Underground Service Alert of Southern California – Unified Communications
Customer Profile
With approximately 40 employees, Corona, California-based Underground Service Alert of Southern California (a.k.a., DigAlert) is one of the strongest damage-prevention programs in the world, providing a vital safety link between excavators and underground facilities owners.
Situation
DigAlert can’t afford to miss or mishandle a single of its many inbound calls. However, saddled with growing upkeep costs, no future expansion capabilities, and without any way to gather custom statistics or support the growing demand of phone and data integration, DigAlert’s outdated PBX and contact center fell short.NIC Partners began the two-month implementation in April 2007, installing a Cisco Unified Communications platform that creates collaborative, adaptive workspaces by integrating communications and collaboration products and applications.Intelligent Contact Management, which provides ACD functionality including monitoring, control of agent state, routing and queuing of contacts, real-time data for agents and supervisors, and historical reporting.Finally, NIC Partners installed Calabrio Compliance Recording and Quality Management, the only solution built for Cisco Unified Contact Center environments to record and log customer interactions. As California continues to grow, so does its infrastructure of underground facilities such as electric, gas, fiber optic and petroleum lines. Before breaking ground, excavators and underground facilities owners by law must contact DigAlert – the One-Call Notificaiton Center supporting all of Southern Caliornia – to safely identify hidden dangers.
“We needed a robust, scalable solution to support our needs today and down the road,” explains Jim Schwilk, vice president, DigAlert. “We wanted an integrated, single-infrastructure solution that converged data, voice, and voice recording, to streamline operations and deliver multiple modes of customer interaction. And the solution had to have QoS features since voice is our primary communication mode.”
DigAlert turned to existing technology partner, NIC Partners, to implement an advanced Cisco communications and contact center solution. Established in 1997, the Rancho Cucamonga, California-based Cisco Gold Certified Partner with approximately 35 employees had the experience, expertise, and commitment to customer satisfaction DigAlert sought – making them a strong fit.
To that, NIC Partners added Cisco Unified Contact Center that combines multichannel automatic call distributor (ACD) functionality with IP telephony in a unified solution, delivering intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management. NIC Partners also implemented Cisco Unified
Solution
“Our voice solution is reliable and provides a full suite of features and functionality that has improved companywide communication and collaboration,” says Schwilk “And our voice-recording solution provides reliability and fault tolerance, and enables us to record all incoming calls and archive them for five years.
“CTI functionality in our contact center provides agents valuable information on their desktops, which enables them to engage in more efficient and informed customer interactions. The solution logs and reports on real-time call volume and provides statistics on how busy each operator is so we can properly load balance the number of agents needed at a given time, and we can extend the contact center’s infrastructure to connect to satellite offices and datacenters to ensure disaster recovery. All of which amounts to significantly reduced operational costs, shorter customer wait times, and lower costs for DigAlert members.
“Every call we take could save a loss of life or property, so we require a fully reliable and scalable communications solution. NIC Partners and Cisco definitely delivered on our expectations and we’ll continue partnering with them as our business and goals continue to grow and evolve.”
Underground Service Alert of Southern California – Unified Communications
Customer Profile