Iris Modern Urban Management (IMUM), a company tasked with the management of Abu Dhabi's paid parking system has deployed the Customer Interaction Center (CIC) contact center solution from Interactive Intelligence Group to handle in excess of 30,000 incoming and 10,000 outgoing calls per month and deliver an exemplary level of customer service excellence.

The system which supports agents in both the dedicated contact centre as well as remote customer service locations has been integrated with the central CRM system of Abu Dhabi's Department of Transport (DOT) allowing for  seamless flow and access to information. The implementation was carried out by Interactive Intelligence’s partner EMW.

The DOT's contract with IMUM for the management of over 95,000 parking spaces placed utmost importance to customer service and required that the CIC system meet a number of stringent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Of these, were the ability to natively offer dual language support (Arabic and English), to integrate with the client’s CRM system and display assimilated information on a single easy-to-read dashboard and to flexibly and dynamically modify the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system so as to rapidly reflect necessary changes. In line with the DOT's employment policies, CIC caters to employees with special needs working either at the contact center or remotely.

“We had initially outsourced the contact center but soon realised that in doing so we were losing out on a wealth of knowledge in the form of feedback of our customers. A thorough evaluation of the solutions available in the market and the confidence instilled in us by Interactive Intelligence's regional partner EMW led us to select the CIC solution. In just three months of running the solution, we have seen how much more efficient it has made our operations and how much it has improved the service experience for our customers,” said  James Fraser, operations director at IMUM.

An important factor in the success of the implementation has been the CIC solution's flexibility in resource allocation. After insourcing the contact centre, IMUM quickly realised that despite being a 24/7 service, call volumes peaked between 4 pm and 10 pm whereas the footfall at the customer service locations dropped during this period. Identifying this trend and utilising the system's ability to connect customers to agents at these remote service locations through PC based 'soft phones' eliminated the need to hire additional agents who would have a lower utilization during off-peak periods, the statement said.

The dynamic IVR system has also drastically helped cut down agent interactions and improved resolution times. Of the over 30,000 calls received per month, just over 11,000 are forwarded to agents while the remaining ones are managed by the IVR itself. This has freed up agents to attend to more unique customer problems. The contact centre now registers over 10,000 call backs per month which has been instrumental in improving the customer service experience, it said. - TradeArabia News Service