Endsleigh, one of the UK's leading independent insurance providers, has chosen Azzurri Communications to design and implement a new multi-channel contact centre. The five year contract is worth £2.5m and is for 1,000 seats, virtualised across three sites.

It will see Azzurri’s Contact Centre Assistance Suite (CCAS) deployed to offer multi-channel functionality on top of the Avaya Aura Elite platform, supporting Endsleigh’s strategic objective to provide a consistent brand and service across all its customer interaction methods.

Many of Endsleigh’s customers are university students and young professionals who are tech-savvy and advanced in their use of digital and social media. But Endsleigh’s existing telecoms infrastructure was a collection of disparate standards and capabilities from suppliers such as BT, Siemens and Aspect, installed across different sites. This was making it difficult for Endsleigh to retain a single view of the customer across all their interactions with them, as well as creating system support issues.

Peter Leahy, Head of IT at Endsleigh, said: “The UK insurance market is highly competitive, with most insurers offering similarly priced products and policies. But we believe we can differentiate by providing a better customer experience through the effective use of multi-channel technology.” The key benefits Endsleigh expect to gain from the solution are:

1.Multi-channel capability: customers will be able to contact Endsleigh through the channel of their choosing – so in addition to voice, web-chat and web-call backs will be offered, with social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter to follow.

2.A single customer view: The solution uses Azzurri’s Callmedia software to ‘blend’ outbound marketing activity with inbound enquiries, so contact centre agents always have a single view of the customer.

3.Cost reduction and regulatory compliance: Significant savings will be made through improved agent utilisation and the automation of routine processes, while the software ensures Endsleigh always remains in compliance with UK regulatory requirements.

Peter Leahy continues: “The business-critical nature of our contact centre meant that we wanted to procure the most reliable solution possible. We also wanted to ensure we could be agile to our customers’ preferred contact methods: the Avaya Elite platform is highly resilient for voice routing, but our customers want to communicate with us through any number of media channels. That’s why we opted for the integration of Azzurri’s CCAS, which is specifically designed to provide cutting-edge multi-channel capability to Elite.”

Multi-channel contact centres have the potential for complexity as they handle more communication methods than traditional call centres. But Azzurri’s CCAS product allows for fully ‘blended’ multi-media interactions into the contact centre. It’s a fully open and modular solution, meaning organisations can target specific areas of customer interaction that need improving, from the time a call arrives, to the moment an agent completes their post-call work.

Vim Vithaldas, CEO, Azzurri Communications said: “Azzurri has a very strong track record as a provider of multi-channel contact centres to the insurance and financial services sectors. We’re being chosen as a trusted partner by leading firms like Endsleigh as we bring a unique combination of in-house software development capability and deep experience as an independent integrator across Avaya, Mitel and Cisco platforms. This ensures our customers get the technology solution they need to achieve their business objectives.”