Salmat moves contact centres to private cloud

Salmat will move 45 of its contact centres to a new ‘Reach’ private cloud platform over the next year, consolidating 10 PABX installations and more than 60 servers across the country.

The outsourcer launched Reach yesterday after a seven-year, $30 million development effort involving technology partners Avaya, Nuance and Auraya Systems.

The VoIP-based platform was intended to replace Salmat’s SalesForce system in client contact centres, the 45 centres that Salmat operated on behalf of clients, and 10 Salmat offices.

“We’ve consolidated our telephony infrastructure across our two data centres, whereas previously it was disparate and dispersed across our business,” Salmat’s chief technology officer of speech solutions, Brett Feldon, said.

“We wanted something that we would use ourselves to underpin our own business with over 100 million calls per year and a quarter of our revenue depending upon it.”

Salmat’s clients include Woolworths, Westpac and Telstra. The latter company deployed Reach prior to this week’s official launch for its Business Awards contact centre agents.

Although SalesForce was installed at client premises and in Salmat’s various contact centre locations, Reach was served from two central data centres in Victoria and NSW.

Reach incorporated inbound and outbound telephone, SMS and email communications to end-customers, as well as social media including Facebook and Twitter.

The platform was provided under a scalable, pay-as-you-go model with optional add-on features such as biometric technology, social media response and monitoring, and analytics.

It was integrated into organisations’ customer relationship management (CRM) systems, where all data was held, and could be served to client contact centres and home agents.

The National Australia Bank moved 3200 staff to a similar ‘virtual contact centre’ platform in July, with a view to trialling work-from-home contact centre agents by the year’s end.

NAB expected its virtual contact centre platform to shave 30 percent off its operational costs, while improving wait times and allowing it to optimise its rostering.

Salmat chief executive officer Grant Harrod said Reach could cut costs for clients by half but did not disclose pricing details.