Travel West Midlands expands its BT SmartNumbers service

London, England. October 2006

Travel West Midlands, the UK's largest urban bus network outside of London, has successfully introduced the BT SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre service into its IT Help Desk and Direct Debit departments.

BT SmartNumbers has been used within the Travel West Midlands IT Help Desk department since July 2006. The service delivers calls to help desk advisors, regardless of their location and provides staff and managers with access to real-time management information (MI) reports. A single SmartNumbers ‘Virtual Team Number’ is promoted to employees as a single point of contact.

As a direct result of the success of BT SmartNumbers, the service has been extended to the Travel West Midlands Direct Debit department – with roll-out completed in September 2006.

BT SmartNumbers helps organisations with a dispersed workforce gain competitive advantage by providing location-independent solutions for flexible working, business continuity and virtual contact centres without the need for organisations to invest in new equipment.

“The service has enhanced the efficiency of the Help Desk and given us the flexibility to make instant changes” said Darren Lester, IT Network controller at Travel West Midlands. “The service is so easy to administer that any Team member can make changes to messages and call routing rules in an instant. When we've needed it, technical support and advice from SmartNumbers has been excellent.”

“SmartNumbers has also played an important part in enabling self-empowerment within the Help Desk” he continues. “Advisors can now view SmartNumbers management information reports on screens within the department, see where problems are occurring and take their own initiatives to resolve those issues.”

For Travel West Midlands, BT SmartNumbers delivers:

• A time based routing facility that enables out of hours and weekend calls to be sent direct to the mobiles of on duty Team Members
• High volume voicemail management for teams within Outlook
• The ability to record and play automated information messages to callers in the event of major network faults, email problems etc.
• A comprehensive web based MI reporting tool that shows call statistics, agent performance and service levels for each service - both in real time and historically. These reports enable managers and administrators to improve quality of service by better matching agent shift patterns to busy periods

The flexibility of the BT SmartNumbers service enables the needs of each business it serves to be met through simple configuration. Travel West Midlands briefed SmartNumbers on how it wished its team of advisors to handle incoming calls. SmartNumbers then matched the call flows to meet Travel West Midlands' specific requirements.

About Travel West Midlands

Travel West Midlands (formerly West Midlands Travel) was established as a Company on 26th October 1986, following the 1985 Transport Act and deregulation of bus services.

They now run the UK's largest urban bus network outside of London and are one of the region's biggest employers with a staff compliment of over 5,000, including 3,300 drivers. They carry nearly 1 million passengers a day on a modern fleet of 1,800 vehicles across nearly 600 routes throughout the West Midlands. Travel West Midlands is part of the National Express Group plc. More information can be found at www.travelwm.co.uk