UK's largest home-working contact-centre adopts SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre solution

London, England. August 2004

Vertical Group the largest home-worker contact-centre network in the UK, today announced their deployment of the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact-Centre Solution. The solution will initially be deployed for over 400 home-based agents serving their customers in the travel sector, but will shortly be available to customers across all sectors.

Under their branding of VO-CALL SmartNumbers is an intelligent telephony and messaging solution, which Call-link, responsible for the revolutionary portal and selling system, Magic Desktop, is making available to the UK travel industry.

VO-CALL SmartNumbers will allow travel companies to set up virtual call-centres, enabling home-workers based around the country to be contacted by customers who dial a central 0870 number. Their call is then diverted to any UK landline at no extra cost to the company. SmartNumbers also allows businesses to send messages to all home-workers simultaneously. In addition, the service-level management tools with this Virtual Contact Centre will enable shift managers and to provision agents in real-time, monitoring queues, service-levels, agent availability and efficiency in real-time.

Dennis Gardner, director of the Vertical Group, said: “We are unique in offering travel companies the ability to integrate telephony and messaging into their existing business processes. This can provide organisations with great cost savings as well as new business flexibility.”

Geoffrey Paterson, CEO of SmartNumbers said “We value this partnership with Vertical Group and the benefits of the virtual contact centre that their agents and customers will accrue. We are seeing the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre not only drive down the cost of service provisioning, but through flexible working will significantly reduce agent churn. In addition, our real-time service level management tools can ensure that service-level management and load-balancing of agents across multiple queues can be easily accomplished.”

About Vertical Group

Call-link is a dynamic company created to deliver world-class communication and technology solutions to the corporate, SME, and SOHO market place. Call-link is a licensed telecoms operator, capable of delivering a mix of value-added services.