The provider of User Process Management (UPM) software, Corizon, has announced a major software licence deal with British Telecom, initially worth £1.25 million over the next 12 months.
BT has added Corizons UPM Platform to its strategic software stack alongside products such as Siebel and Geneva to allow it to drive up the efficiency of its call centres and improve customer services. The release note points that the license will be used to begin deployment of Corizon software in up to ten new projects. Each will deliver a rapid return on investment by re-using existing applications to create a simplified user interface to optimise customer service processes in call centres. It will also provide BT with a framework to isolate agents in call centre operations from ongoing IT system change, making it easier and faster to deploy the new IT systems required to support the launch of new products and services.
BT said it plans to deploy the Corizon UPM platform in its UK call centres, where agents often use more than five applications such as CRM, billing, and operational support systems during the course of a customer interaction. A series of composite user interfaces are being built that link components from these applications together to support the users tasks. Based on success in projects to date, BT expect benefits from better first call resolution, reduced agent training time, shorter call-handling time and improved process control and visibility. The company also anticipates accelerated return on investment from their ongoing CRM implementation programme.
Jim Preston, Head of Technology for BT Retail, commented The Corizon UPM Platform has already proven its worth and so this next phase of deployment makes perfect sense to us. In particular, one of our goals at BT is to ensure our call centres are staffed with multi-skilled customer service agents who are able to spend more time intelligently solving customer queries, and less time struggling with a maze of IT applications. The UPM layer that Corizon introduces helps to ensure that we meet these objectives without impacting on our core application delivery programmes.
BTs Retail Division have been working with Corizons technology since 2002 and have deployed it in a range of product lines including BT Mobile and BT Openworld. In the former project, launched July 2003, Corizons technology reduced the time agents spent accessing applications by up to 90%.