Faced with the difficulties of managing 11 different IP telephony systems in 13 offices around the world, online finance company CMC Markets recently decided to simplify things by standardising on a single communications platform.

The first phase of the upgrade, based on Avaya’s Communication Manager IP telephony suite and integrated with CMC’s existing call centre applications, was performed earlier this year with the help of systems integrator Datapoint. The system will be used by dealers and technical service staff handling spread betting, contact for difference (CFD) and foreign exchange transactions.

CMC previously used a mixture of Inter-tel (since merged with Mitel) and Avaya telephony systems in its various offices, and found that some, including the one installed at its London office, were already working beyond their original capacity.

“The main driver was to standardise our telephony supplier and configuration in all of our offices, using our London HQ as a central hub and delivering failover and security on top of that,” says CMC Markets IT infrastructure manager Ian Wright.

Given the nature of CMC Markets' business, one of the key elements is the integration of Verint’s global voice recording system, designed to meet regulatory requirements in 15 different countries.

“When you are dealing with people’s money, regulatory bodies like the FSA require agents to record calls for audit and compliance requirements, but each country has different rules,” says Wright.

Employees will also be able to search customer details by date, time or call centre agent to speed up their response and call handling, something that could not be done with the previous telephony systems in place.

CMC briefly considered other IP communications software platforms from Siemens, Cisco and its existing supplier Inter-tel, but having existing expertise on an Avaya telephony system already in use at its Sydney office tipped the balance.

“The [Avaya] investment in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region was only two years old and would have been too big a write down,” says Wright. “No hardware upgrades were needed – it was just a case of making configuration changes to the underlying Cisco switching technology.”

The system will not be completely rolled out until 2010, but will eventually link 13 different offices in Europe, the US and Canada, and the APAC region and about 1,000 users across the globe. So far, all the European offices in Germany and Austria have been upgraded to use the telephony elements of the Avaya software, but the next stage will be to explore the options around unified communications that Avaya Communications Manager version 5 provides, such as online chat and skills-based routing that matches customer knowledge and language requirements with agents based in different regions of the world.

“What we are looking at now is how to connect our APAC systems, which luckily are Avaya, but at least one location needs a technology refresh to reach the standards we have set,” says Wright.

“We also need to start looking at the global call management and routing them through our London office, rather than through the APAC region.”

CMC says it does not expect to save money on call charges by installing the telephony system – rather it was after a best-of-breed software from a company that it could be sure would be around for some time to come.

“The project was not intended as a cost savings exercise, and Avaya is probably the most expensive system on the market,” says Wright. “It is more about having good telephony features around call routing – making sure they put through to the right person at the right time in order to improve customer retention.”