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New England Credit Union (NECU), Australia’s inland regional community credit union, has chosen a unified communications solution from the tandem of Nortel (News - Alert) and Microsoft to reduce business costs and improve customer service. The new technology solution, which will be implemented early next month, is expected to save the company a minimum of A$100,000 per year through increased productivity, reduced travel time, and other time-saving features.

 

Nortel’s open architecture supports integration of business voice services with NECU’s Tandberg (News - Alert) video conferencing system to deliver video-to-the-desktop functionality. Microsoft’s desktop software further enables click-to-call video conferencing from any location.

 

“One of our main challenges is locating the right person in our organization to answer a customer query in a timely manner and then being able to contact them directly,” says David Cook, chief information officer, NECU. “This was underlined by a recent report that showed 20 percent of our contact center agents’ time was spent looking for the right person in our organization to handle specific customer queries.”

 

Thus, NECU went in search of new technology that would solve its dilemma while leveraging its existing investment in its company-wide video conferencing system. Ideally, it was looking to unify its voice and video capabilities along with and customer data, to provide more personalized customer service — ultimately leading to greater overall customer satisfaction.

 

“Nortel impressed us with the direct software integration between its communication network and Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Office Communications Server software, providing specific information about each of our expert resources available in real-time to all of our branches,” says Cook. “This gives us an incredibly powerful platform for connecting our people with our customers in a variety of different ways — through audio, video, text, and IM — and ensures that, regardless of where our customers are located, we have the resources available to serve them.”

 

NECU is patently pleased with its newfound solution that it already is looking ahead to the next phase of the project — it is hoping to be able to extend the same video capabilities to its customers via the Web.

 

“This will give customers direct access to our consultants through the video conferencing system, presenting them with a new way of communicating directly with our staff without having to leave their homes,” added Cook.

 

Nortel’s solution demonstrated other competitive advantages that made it appealing to NECU.

 

“Nortel and Microsoft’s alliance gives them a clear time-to-market advantage that’s well ahead of what any of their competitors could muster,” says Cook. “It was also obvious that we were speaking the same language when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint through energy-efficient technology and cutting back on unnecessary travel. And it was also an easy sell to my CFO. The operational savings we’ve calculated as a result of implementing this technology are substantial. Delivering significant customer service enhancement more efficiently will have lasting benefits on both our top and bottom line.”

 

“Nortel’s solution is helping NECU overcome the challenges of one-to-one communication in an organization that is spread across multiple branches, some in remote rural areas,” says Mark Stevens, president, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel. “This unified communications approach will help NECU stand out from the crowd as people look for different ways of collaborating with each other and their service organizations, using multiple web-enabled devices in today’s era of Hyperconnectivity — when anything that can be connected to the network is being connected.”

 

Nortel’s solution for NECU centers on its flagship Communications Server (CS) 1000, a unified communications IP PBX (News - Alert) that integrates with Microsoft OCS to enable multiple call features, including unified messaging, presence, IM and voice and video calls from the desktop. The CS1000 is accessible to all of NECU’s branches over the company’s wide area network, supported by Nortel’s Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 5520s at NECU’s head office and business continuity locations.

 

The solution also incorporates Nortel’s 1140E IP handsets at select locations, though majority of staffers use Microsoft’s softphones. NECU’s incumbent contact center technology will be replaced by Nortel’s Contact Centre 6.0 platform to provide complete integration with the new unified communications functionality.