Contact Center for “Irkutskenergosbyt”

The partnership of BELTEL and OОO “Irkutskenergosbyt” began when the management of the company decided to merge the contact centers of its retail and grid branches into a single center to serve customers across Irkutsk oblast (region). 

Prior to the merger, one of the sites used a solution from Nortel Networks (Avaya NES), while the other was based on a platform from a Russian vendor. The idea was to deploy a single full-fledged contact center to provide services to “Irkutskenergosbyt” clients. Given the company’s previous experience with its existing solutions, as well as reliability and functionality considerations, it was decided to go for Avaya Aura.

The core of the contact center is Avaya’s Aura Contact Center solution. 

For easier interaction with the users, the contact center features automated call authentication based on caller’s telephone number and address.

To improve the efficiency of its operations, the contact center uses IVR Avaya Aura Experience Portal. The system also features Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech module from Nuance. Thanks to the new system components, the subscribers can receive answers to their inquiries and report the readings of their energy meters in an automatic mode without waiting for an agent to take the call. In addition, they can use voice rather that DTMF for this.

To play back music and audio ads, a Miran expansion module was added.

Apart from voice calls, the contact center processes email inquiries. The new platform can place both voice and non-voice calls in the same queues. Different rules can be set up for processing of phone calls and emails – for instance, when the traffic of incoming phone calls is low, agents can focus on email inquiries, and the other way around, or they can process both types of inquiries in a mixed mode. All agents’ activities are logged for further analysis, which is important for measuring the efficiency of customer care.

To work with delinquent customers, notify customers of service interruption, and conduct marketing surveys, the contact center uses outbound calling with or without agent involvement.

To implement automated outbound calling, BELTEL developed a custom application and integrated it with the customer’s external systems. The application supports multiple outbound calling scripts and has a reporting subsystem and a campaign management interface.

For subscriber service quality assurance, Avaya’s Workforce Management Contact Recorder was introduced to help resolve disputes and evaluate the performance of contact center employees.

As part of the project, BELTEL performed large-scale integration of Avaya and Nuance products with external information systems and databases of OOO “Irkutskenergosbyt”.

In 2014, BELTEL was named Number 1 for the “Development of EP/POM/OD Applications and CC Agent SDK’s for Avaya Contact Center Solutions”. The award-winning product was BELTEL’s IVR system with automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech functionality based on Avaya Aura Experience Portal (AAEP) 6.0 – i.e. the solution that we had supplied to OOO “Irkutskenergosbyt”.