Teachers Credit Union deploys unified communications

Australia’s second-largest credit union, the Teachers Credit Union, has deployed a 126-seat unified communications call centre solution from Interactive Intelligence. The Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) application suite provides a multimedia contact centre capability which is being used to manage communications across five locations in New South Wales, Canberra and Perth.

The deployment is expected to lead to faster, cheaper and more responsive engagement with the financial institution’s 155,000-plus members. It has also provided a platform which the Teachers Credit Union can use to develop new IP-based agent-directed and self-service applications for product areas. These applications will potentially provide line managers with greater control over their own channel activities, ultimately leading to enhanced service delivery.

“The real benefit of the CIC is that it greatly improves base capability and gives us the opportunity to build new products to create a competitive advantage,” said Colin Thomas, IT manager, Teachers Credit Union.

The CIC deployment incorporates a range of disaster recovery procedures to ensure that the contact centre is always available and calls are not lost even if site connections are interrupted. Should one office go down, management of calls automatically switches to another nearby Teachers Credit Union office. In the worst-case scenario, if a major disaster occurs, the system reverts to making and receiving calls through the public switched telephone network.

In addition to call centre functionality, the CIC deployment includes call and screen recording, outbound predictive dialling and workforce management tools.

The CIC was selected by Teachers Credit Union in consultation with its technology supplier, United Business Solutions. The decision was based on CIC’s ease of deployment, its simplicity of operation and because it offered a non-proprietary base from which the credit union could take advantage of IP technologies. The implementation was managed by Interactive Intelligence’s elite partner, CallTime Solutions.

“All in all, I think that the deployment has gone really well. It’s been a first-class effort. Throughout the project our business has not skipped a beat in terms of taking or making phone calls,” Thomas concluded.