Case Study: Welsh Water

Welsh Water wanted to upgrade its telephony system and Contact Centre facilities for two of its key departments - the Billing & Income Division and the Operational Activity Centre - which handles calls from the public including its blue lamp 24-hour emergency service. Together these two departments handle the largest volume of calls from customers and are the external face of the organisation.

Welsh Water needed a communications partner that could design, implement and maintain an infrastructure that would deliver a very high quality customer service and could provide a call recording solution that would monitor customer service standards and satisfaction levels in order to provide service excellence and demonstrate compliance. The company also wanted to ensure a highly resilient solution with 24/7 reliability and excellent business continuity and disaster recovery features.

NextiraOne designed and implemented the new Customer Interaction solution for Welsh Water, incorporating a new IP telephony platform, Contact Centre and full interaction recording solution for two of the organisation's key customer-facing departments - Billing & Income and its Operational Activity Centre (OAC). These two departments handle over 1.2 million calls per annum on behalf of Welsh Water, and the choice of a robust, resilient system that can manage this volume of traffic is critical to the company's success.

NextiraOne experts designed an infrastructure based on the Alcatel-Lucent IP Telephony OmniPCX Enterprise platform with a 500+-seat OmniGenesys Contact Centre and Nice Perform voice recording solution and analytics package. This solution integrates into the existing Welsh Water Data Centre infrastructure .

This solution represents the ideal platform to meet Welsh Water's requirements - the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise platform integrates key technologies within a single easy-to-manage platform, which can be distributed across multiple sites and joined together with existing legacy PABX systems. The Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform processes customer calls intelligently so that they are immediately routed to the right resources. The Nice Recording package allows all calls to be recorded both for compliance and for quality management and training purposes.

NextiraOne also maintains and supports the system with a five-year Managed Services contract that also means Welsh Water's communications are assured of full business continuity, disaster recovery and scalability.

In addition NextiraOne supported Welsh Water's move to the new Linea Building, providing technical and solution support through a phased migration that allowed all 600 staff to move to the new premises without down-time, system failures or impact on customer service. The technical and solution support for moving staff and technology required careful design and planning, plus extensive testing. NextiraOne conducted full design/build/test programmes before the migration. The team also carried out functionality and acceptance testing, including volume testing of the Contact Centre facilities, conducted in conjunction with Empirix, a specialist testing partner.

The migration proved to be highly successful - with not one single call lost or mishandled during or immediately after the operation. This was extremely important as it involved moving staff in business-critical Operations and Billing areas of the organisation. The blue lamp service, for example handles 24/7 emergency calls for situations such as flooding and is important also in keeping the public informed. Welsh Water needed to be sure that this service would function without interruption.