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Amcat Gets Countrywide Skips Deal (What's a "Skip?")By David Sims TMCnet Contributing Editor Contact center vendor Amcat has been chosen by Birmingham-based Countrywide Skips to provide their customer contact management system. The new system will enable the company to manage inbound advertising response from consumers looking to hire a skip anywhere in the country, and will automate its business-to-business telemarketing campaigns, according to company officials. (Question to British readers: What the hey's a "skip?") David Austin, Managing Director at Countrywide Skips, said they started the brokerage operation in May with an on-line advertising campaign, and inclusion in other media such as Yellow Pages. Whatever skips are they're popular items: "The number of telephone enquiries this generated was phenomenal, and within a short period of time we were handling over a 1,000 calls per month," Austin says. It was obvious to skip officials that they needed to automate the whole telephony process. "We needed to implement a complete unified customer contact product with comprehensive statistics and reporting, that would ensure that we could handle all the new enquiries correctly, while getting the best deal for our clients from the 400 preferred suppliers that we work with across the UK." Austin said he was introduced to Amcat as a result of a recommendation from a business colleague who had used their Contact Center Suite for a mobile phone business. "Based on this referral," he said, "we decided to invite the company to provide a demonstration and the results were impressive. It had everything we needed including inbound and outbound customer contact, real-time statistics and IVR Placing the sort of faith one would expect from skips, Austin said he expects "the new system to manage over 5,000 calls per month within the next few months and our inbound calls to increase to around 16,000 within 12 months." The beauty of the Amcat product, he noted, is that it is good for growing companies, since "we can add new capacity as we expand and implement new features when we need them. We also have the capability to integrate it with our other business systems such as Sage in the future." In July Amcat announced a partnership with Aculab (News - Alert) to use its Prosody X next generation media processing platform, which includes enhanced VoIP The relationship was established to enable Amcat customers, "especially those with multiple sites and/or mission critical operations," Amcat officials said at the time, to "take advantage of the greater IP Amcat Chief Marketing Officer Richard Costello, no relation to Bud, Elvis, Frank or Peter, said the company's been offering IP-based contact center solutions for several years, and that the relationship with Aculab gives Amcat "a more robust and feature-rich IP-based" product, more "attractive to all sizes of contact center." Those that can benefit most from the Aculab technology are those operations with more than one site, company officials say, or those that already have an infrastructure heavily dependent on IP or are planning to upgrade to IP as part of their future growth. David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page. |
