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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/financialservices/0,3800010322,39170126,00.htm

Swinton Insurance gets chatty with IP tech
Alcatel-Lucent tech cutting costs and improving customer service

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Thursday 21 February 2008

High street insurance chain Swinton has completed a roll-out of IP telephony and contact centre technology from Alcatel-Lucent.

Swinton paid €2.5m for improved call handling and internal communications across 450 sites aimed at boosting the standard of customer service.

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Adrian Hazeldine, IT director at Swinton Group said the main aim of the project is to answer more calls more efficiently and improve service for the company's two million policy holders.

He said the company has already increased revenue from insurance policy sales and reduced the rate of abandoned called by 25 per cent.

Around 3,000 advisors are already benefiting from the technology and the ability for staff to make free calls between Swinton branches and offices is estimated to generate savings of around £100,000 per year.

For customer calls the system automatically routes to the local (or next nearest) branch of the customer, meaning the amount of calls going to overspill call centres has been cut by 40 per cent.

The system can provide statistical reporting on information such as talk times, abandon rates and internal calls.

It can also be easily scaled up which will be a benefit when Swinton opens its new 150 agent call centre in the next few months.

The technology used includes the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise platform along with its OmniTouch call centre software and the OmniVista 4760 network management system.