Azzurri Communications today announced it has won a contract to provide mutual insurance, retirement and investment group LV= with a new contact centre. The five year contract, worth £5 million, is for a solution based on Avaya’s contact centre technology and Azzurri Communications’ application and integration capabilities.

LV= has 3.8 million customers and is the UK’s fourth biggest car insurer. The company has experienced rapid growth and to respond to business process and customer service challenges they have sought to procure the most robust telephony platform and best possible support and managed service.

As well as gaining a stable telephony platform, LV= also expects to experience operational benefits from the new system, including increased control over contact centre operations, the ability to report on business metrics more efficiently and a significant improvement in agent productivity.

Mike Newton, chief operating officer for LV= said, “Our contact centre is mission critical and a strategic asset for LV=. But 18 months ago, we knew that unless we made a change it could hamper our ambitions. So we scoped out a project for a single group-wide contact centre system, to replace the fragmented systems we had and to improve our disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.”
 
Stage one roll out will take place in early 2011. The components of the solution are an Avaya IP Contact Centre (for 1800 concurrent users with capacity for 2300 users), 2300 IP phones, compliance call recording, workforce management, wallboards and an integrated callback application.

Newton continues: “We whittled down 11 initial bids and eventually selected the Avaya Communications Manager product, with Azzurri as the system integrator and service provider. We felt Communications Manager was a scalable and reliable system that best fitted our specific requirements. And while other integrators put forward an Avaya solution in their bids, we chose Azzurri to integrate and manage it because they demonstrated a clear understanding of our business drivers, could deliver value-adding functionality, and were professional and focused throughout the tender process.”

While the new solution is an investment, it also provides LV= with immediate cost savings of £500,000, as a result of supplier consolidation (LV= previously had nine different vendor contact centre platforms) and the fact that Azzurri will manage the new system through a single SLA.

As well as a robust platform to underpin their growth, LV= is expecting to benefit from technology innovations. Newton explains: “One of the unique features Azzurri offered was the Azzurri Toolbar, which allows for call delivery and access to other interaction types such as call backs to customers from a single interface. Having seen it in action we understood that it removed the need for expensive items that other suppliers were offering as part of their solution. The system also ‘blends’ the callback requests we receive from customers via phone, so it’s truly multi-channel.”

Mark Quartermaine, CEO, Azzurri Communications, said “This is an important new contract win for Azzurri. Our contact centre managed service and systems integration capability is at the heart of our business and we look forward to working with LV= to deliver this strategic project.”