Portman Building Society, one of the largest building societies and mortgage lenders in the United Kingdom, announced it has deployed CallXpress, an industry-leading unified communications product by Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) at its headquarters and across a network of 114 branch offices.
CallXpress delivers advanced unified messaging and speech-enabled capabilities that are designed to help companies deliver first rate customer service by allowing employees to communicate and collaborate more productively and effectively.
Customer service continues to be a top priority for mortgage banking, investment and insurance companies. In such a competitive business sector the challenge is to attract and retain customers. With mergers and acquisitions constantly taking place, a key communications requirement is to ensure consistency through the integration of the different types of systems including PBXs, contact centres and voice mail. In order to stay competitive, Portman decided it needed to upgrade its existing corporate communications system to include a unified messaging application that would combine all of these aspects in an affordable, easy-to-use solution.
After discussing these requirements with Avanquest, an expert supplier of leading-edge, best-of-breed corporate solutions and a qualified reseller of AVST products, Portman selected AVST's CallXpress unified communications solution. David Lincoln, group networks manager at Portman, said, "Key factors in our decision to go with CallXpress were its ability to run in a Microsoft Mail environment with a simple migration path to Microsoft Exchange, and the ability to integrate with our Lucent SDX INDeX switches."
Avanquest installed a 20-port CallXpress system with DPNSS integration along with a 12-port RightFax Enterprise system. Portman's employees now receive immediate notification and access to voice, fax and email messages from their Outlook inbox from any location.
"The productivity of our workers has improved across the board," Lincoln explained. "CallXpress displays all voice, email and fax messages together within one familiar email inbox, making it easy to quickly prioritise and retrieve messages of all kinds from any computing or wireless device. Employees spend less time managing messages and more time acting on them."
"CallXpress bridges the gap between voice and electronic messaging by tying voice processing and PBX integration into a standard email infrastructure," said AVST's Vice President of Marketing, Denny Michael. "We designed CallXpress to support the leading environments, as well as integrate with legacy systems, to offer many levels of integration between existing voice mail services and email inboxes."
CallXpress combines voice, fax and email messages in one inbox and makes them accessible via telephone, wireless device or computer. Users do not have to be in the office or logged onto a computer to access their email. They can receive and respond to messages anywhere, anytime. That means customers aren't left waiting, mobile workers are accessible and urgent messages are available right away. This greatly increases service levels and also provides a consistent corporate interface to the customers.
Lincoln continued, "First class messaging is a must-have tool for any client service-driven organisation, and CallXpress enables our team members to respond to client inquires in an efficient manner. The end users have taken to it like a duck to water, and the installation and training time investment was minimal. The installation of CallXpress was an overall success."