Fexco is a specialist provider of money transfer, business, merchant and consumer services, with 1,400 employees and five call centres in Ireland, the UK and other parts of Europe.

To help retain existing customers and attract new ones, Fexco needed to upgrade its contact centre telephony platform to offer more advanced collaboration features, and move to an all-IP infrastructure.

Last year, the company spent e500,000 (£396,000) on migrating from Nortel’s Symposium platform to the vendor’s latest Contact Centre 6.0 unified communications system, which adds multimedia and detailed reporting options.

Danny Kerins, head of telecoms services at Fexco, says new clients are looking for a lot more from the company, such as being able to measure customer satisfaction, handle different types of content and provide in-depth reporting.

“A business opportunity for us at the time had a requirement for outbound dialling and email,” says Kerins.

“We considered some hosted service offerings from other vendors to do that, alongside smaller telephony products from companies that could provide outbound campaigns, but we know how reliable and trustworthy Nortel is and that it does what it says it will, which ultimately is what matters.

“The return on investment comes from the deal that was won on the back of the upgrade. We have not done the metrics properly yet, but we are much better off in terms of ease of use and staff management.”

Fexco has not yet purchased a licence for the web collaboration part of Nortel Contact Centre, though it will soon evaluate the features on offer.

“Part of our business is an online tours reservation engine – when we have bedded down the email handling and outbound dialling, we will look at the web collaboration part of the package,” says Kerins.

Last year, Fexco ADSL-enabled about 1,500 UK contact centre agents, providing new web-based applications that allow agents to contact key customer Western Union directly and set up automated interactive voice recognition and computer telephony integration platforms.

“We have additional agents kept for contingency planning and the platform can scale up to 400 people,” says Kerins.

“We looked at collaboration technologies to support home working previously and we are capable of doing it, but have chosen not to do it so far. It may become more attractive in terms of cost efficiency as fuel and transport bills rise.”