Pan-European Virtual Contact Centre solution for BEA Systems Customer Support Desk

London, England. December 2006

The Customer Support Desk of BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, is able to route in-bound customer calls to personnel right across Europe, as a result of signing up to a Virtual Contact Centre solution based on BT SmartNumbers, a next generation voice service.

The BT SmartNumbers service supports BEA Call Co-ordinators across the company's European support centres in High Wycombe, Paris and Munich. The Co-ordinators provide first point of contact for all European customer support calls to determine the priority and schedule of callbacks for the company’s 60 European Developer Relations Engineers (DREs). BEA has been using the SmartNumbers service since 2004.

The European support centres are an integrated part of the company’s global 24/7 support operation. The operation works on a 'follow-the-sun' basis with all global support calls answered by a central AT&T network routing service that determines – dependent on time of day and location of caller – whether calls are best handled in the America, EMEA or APAC region.

The BT SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre replaced an Automatic Call Distributor system at the BEA Paris office. BEA was looking for a more advanced solution that could simply and seamlessly distribute calls to personnel anywhere in Europe, provide extended language coverage, improve reporting facilities, provide in-built voice continuity and required no investment in on-site equipment.

“In looking for a replacement for our ACD, we considered both in house Virtual Contact Centre solutions and hosted services,” explains Nicola Brockwell, Director EMEA Frontline Support at BEA. “BT SmartNumbers represented a high value, easy-to-implement solution, and we’ve been very pleased with its performance. It is extremely easy-to-use and enables us to better understand call flows and service demands by language.”

“We wanted a system that was self-manageable by the Support Team. We can add and remove languages, switch between Support Centres and, in the event of an outage, log in via the web and instantly redirect calls to our mobiles and home phones. A year ago, we moved our Paris office and the service was completely unaffected.”