23 Apr 1997
United Utilities, the company formed from the merger of North West Water and Norweb, is spending #10.5m to create a combined virtual call centre which it claims will be the largest in the UK.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) has won the contract and will design and implement the system with the United-owned IT outsourcing company Vertex Data Science.
Allan Trayes, customer services director at Vertex, said the call centre would benefit the utility, not just by offering economies of scale, but by giving different parts of the organisation access to data they could not get before.
It will also allow the introduction of teleworking. 'You can route calls wherever you want and get common views of data. It also handles the Internet and correspondence,' said Trayes.
The system will be built on HP9000 Unix servers with Compaq PCs at the front end running Windows NT. HP's SmartContact software will integrate traditional aspects of a call centre and interrogate the utility's legacy ICL and IBM mainframes.
United has run a pilot test and expects the first stage of the system to go live within six months.
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