At Panago Pizza’s main call centre in Burnaby, BC, its 120 agents would get thousands of pizza orders a day. Before moving over to an IP telephony solution, Panago handled this high volume under its old Nortel TDM system. According to Amyn Somani, vice-president of corporate services for the Western Canada-based pizza chain, its old system was limiting and did not allow the company to move forward.
“We did not have enough seats in our call centre [in Burnaby]. We needed to expand,” said Somani. Panago has two contact centres, the one in Burnaby and a remote location in Abbostford, BC that has 20 agents.
Somani’s search for a new solution began last April and his key requirements were something that could integrate across multiple sites rather than having stand-alone pocket call centres, provide some functionality at the call centres and head office, and be scalable. After looking at solutions from Cisco and Nortel, Avaya became the solution of choice as it met with all of his requirements.
“It was not the cheapest but it was an investment for the future,” Somani said.
Panago first set up Avaya’s IP telephony phone system at its Abbotsford head office in October, 2004. Then in January 2005, the solution was implemented in its Abbotsford call centre to test the technology before going live at its main Burnaby call centre (it went live in early February of this year.) Since moving to IP, the centres have seen their call capacity increase by 30 per cent.
Another problem Somani had with the old system was it did not have any intelligent call routing but dumped the calls into a general cue. Calls were not getting to the right people who had specific skills sets such as those that handled corporate orders, he said.
As well, there were zero reporting capabilities, Somani added. Today, using Avaya’s contact management services tool, Communications Manager 2.2, Panago is able to get real time and historical information such as a customer’s order history and other delivery information based on a caller’s ID so an agent does not have to ask that information repeatedly. As well, the new system allowed Panago to see the average speed of answers by agents, customer wait times and abandon rates.
“That level of information is first and foremost the greatest benefit [of going IP],” Somani said.
In addition to providing the pizza chain with an IP phone system, Avaya also supplied the S8700 media server and G700 media gateway to connect Panago’s call centres.
“The gateways for Panago have a survivable local processor in them that is regularly updated from the hub site (in Burnaby) of all the features and functions,” said Dean La Riviere, director of sales, Western Canada, for Avaya.
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