Azzurri has implemented a new cloud-based contact centre architecture for decade-long customer Vanquis Bank based on the Avaya platform and the Callmedia 5.0 contact centre management application.

To cope with the growth of Vanquis Bank, which has seen its number of agents increase from 25 to 550+ agents since it was founded in 2002, the company needed to switch from its existing system which was at near full capacity. They needed a highly resilient high-capacity, multi-site contact centre infrastructure that was scalable and worked across multiple locations thus seeing the company throughout its future growth and international expansion.

The new cloud-based contact centre Azzurri has deployed will meet Vanquis Bank's most ambitious growth goals for at least the next five years, with support for upwards of 1,000 extensions and 1,000 telephone lines. The project began by migrating the company's core contact centre operations to a centralised data centre in Corsham, from which calls are routed to the company's four contact centres in various locations across the UK and South Africa. Despite the complexity of the underlying infrastructure the system itself is very simple to use, with agents able to use the phone system as they would their home phone.

Commenting on why they turned to the same company that implemented their first telecoms system in 2002, Adrian Dorey, Telecoms Manager, said, "We never felt the need to look elsewhere because the service has always been excellent from Azzurri."

"Azzurri's real strength is the quality of its engineers. They don't just plug something in and walk away - they take pride in setting it up and offering their opinion on how it can be done better. They really are partners of the business. In the 10 years we have worked with Azzurri we have never had a bad engineer walk through the door."

The new system allows Vanquis to operate its call centre seamlessly across its four locations in the UK and South Africa and has the flexibility of simply needing to 'plug in' new offices when required. Calls are directed to the best agent in the best location, accommodating for any eventuality. This efficient use of agents is also optimised by inbound and outbound calls being blended together meaning if there is an influx of inbound calls more agents can be directed to deal with them until the queue is reduced.

If one telephone circuit is down for a few minutes, the system deployed by Azzurri combats this issue by redirecting calls to another site resulting in none of the incoming phone calls being lost.

The infrastructure gives Vanquis the freedom to expand the number of channels it uses to communicate with its customers as and when it feels necessary. Today the company's primary means of customer communication is via the telephone, however if the company should want to open up any of the additional multi-channel options native to Callmedia e.g. email, SMS, post, then the company can activate them whenever it wants. This future-proof capability means that Vanquis won't need to deploy anything new or re-train its agents to add additional channels.

Vanquis Bank is part of the Provident Financial Group and has over 1.0 million UK customers.