Blake gains competitive advantage with assitance of Spescom Datafusion and Presence Suite

Blake, a privately owned outsource contact center operation in South Africa, has with the assistance of Spescom DataFusion, a division of Spescom Limited, implemented the Presence Suite, optimizing the contact center’s performance. This has given Blake a competitive edge in the international outsourced contact center arena, effectively enabling it to introduce value add services to its customers and expand its offerings within its customer base. The company believes this initiative has contributed to its organic growth of 100 percent over the last two years.

Blake provides telesales, collections, customer support, customer retention and data intelligence services to local and international organizations in the financial services, clothing and furniture retail, telecommunications and medical arenas. It has offices in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Mauritius, with a further presence in South America and Spain. By the end of 2008, Blake will boast over 3 000 local contact center seats.

“In 2006, Blake had about 1 000 seats and had just entered a joint venture resulting in the acquisition of a UK client base. From a South African perspective, value add was critical in terms of competing for the offshore services market since South Africa’s high telecommunications costs put pressure on Blake’s competitive positioning. The benefits lay in implementing world leading technologies to obtain better efficiencies and provide broader services,” says Blake CEO, Mike Miller.

At the time, the joint venture customers had begun to take an interest in outsourcing their customer services and customer retention functions rather than just telesales. The value-adds lay in assessing and improving processes to improve outcomes. “This required a solution that needed to be integrated with the company’s Avaya Communication Manager platform and had to, in particular, be successful in terms of servicing the telecommunications market,” says Miller

Blake then turned to Spescom DataFusion, its technology partner, for a solution.

“We proposed the implementation of the Presence Suite, a multi-channel solution that integrates all contact channels between the customer and the company, maximizing and improving their cost-effectiveness. Another advantage of the Presence Suite was that it integrates tightly with Blake’s Avaya platform, enhancing the capabilities of the solution without removing any of its functionality,” says Paul Fick, MD of Spescom DataFusion.

“By leveraging our technological expertise and our business knowledge of Blake’s operations together with our proficiency with the Presence Suite, we were confident we could deliver a solution that would meet Blake’s requirements,” he says. As the Presence Suite is a fully modular system, it would allow Blake to gradually extend its functionality to suit their business model.”

Following a fact-finding visit to Spain and the UK where Blake assessed the product in telecommunications and outsource environments, Spescom DataFusion completed a 20-seat pilot project for Blake. Within three weeks it showed a 15-20 percent improvement in productivity. Blake then decided to implement it across the organization. The pilot implementation of 20 licenses has grown to 150 and is growing every month.

“The Presence solution allows us to offer value-add services to Blake’s customers, enabling the company to expand its offerings within its client base. This has assisted the company to grow organically by more than 100 percent over the last two years. Blake’s Durban contact center has grown to 2 300 seats and the company is about to launch a Johannesburg operation with 750 seats,” says Miller.