LBM, the UK’s biggest outbound contact centre outsourcer, has deployed a high speed voice and data network from ntl:Telewest Business, part of the Virgin Media Group, in order to improve service levels and reduce the costs of its 125 million annual calls. The MPLS network has enabled the company to make significant savings on communication costs across the business.

Reliability, quality of service and cost management is vital to LBM as it manages the outbound calls for some of the major telcos, insurance and utility companies in the UK. Agents in each of the contact centres connect to their clients’ customer relationship management applications and sales databases in order to make calls on their behalf. With 1,500 agents over four call centre sites, three in Manchester and one in Belfast, the volume of calls that LBM makes each year and the amount of data transferred creates a large demand on the voice and data network.

“Our agents represent our customers every time they pick up the phone. These calls are our lifeblood so it was important for us to choose an innovative solution that offered an extremely high quality of service to ensure our business runs smoothly,” said David Walters, chief information and innovation officer, LBM. “Our network was starting to show some strain with costs rising and failures in the WAN becoming an issue for the business. The MPLS network has enabled us to stay at the forefront of our market, and after just five months with the new network we are seeing an improvement in customer satisfaction as well as cost savings.”

ntl:Telewest Business provided a flexible MPLS network and new telephone lines for LBM. The business can also now make use of voice over IP (VoIP) calls, vastly reducing internal call costs. Improved call management and single number routing also means teams from different contact centres can now work across the same customers simultaneously, rather than requiring agents to all be together on one site.

In order to deploy a network that met LBMs business requirements ntl:Telewest Business had to work flexibly to meet tight deadlines and complete the project on time and in budget.

“Call centres are the first point of contact for many businesses so it is extremely important that they are able to provide a high quality of service,” said Andy Marshall, head of business markets for ntl:Telewest Business in the North. “A fast, reliable network is at the heart of business communications today and it is vital that organisations get the best solution to meet their unique requirements.”