27 February 2014

The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) was established in 1996, following a decision by the tenants and leaseholders of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to pursue their legal right to manage their own homes. The organisation now manages around 10,000 properties on behalf of the borough in this area of West London.

Recently, KCTMO opted to upgrade its Siemens Hi-Path Pro-centre Agile telephone system. It did not want to incur huge costs for the ‘rip and replace’ of its existing communications estate and therefore decided to leave its remaining legacy Siemens systems in place.

Initially, Annodata – which specialises in UC and managed print services – replaced KCTMO’s contact centre with the Mitel 3300 Contact Centre Manager Business Edition (CCM BE). This offered the organisation enhanced networking capabilities, resulting in an immediate improvement of frontline customer services to all residents which in turn significantly reduced legacy service costs.

Replacing the contact centre element with CCM BE has provided KCTMO with an IPT platform. The business can now plan and manage a staged migration for its remaining users onto the 3300 solution.

The system also provides the flexibility to allow staff to access it remotely, and gives KCTMO an extensive level of control and functionality. “The digital display keeps our customer service centre staff up to speed with call volumes and response percentages,” says Nurul Miah, head of ICT services. “Additionally, we needed the system to enable us to easily generate call data reports. We share this data frequently and it helps to drive customer service centre efficiency.”

In addition, home working for staff and contact service agents, coupled with the integration into the existing mobile estate, has provided extra features such as call transfer, third-party conferencing and disaster recovery resilience.

KCTMO is now moving towards a truly unified communications approach. As part of its ongoing business partnership with Annodata, it is currently in the process of upgrading to CCM Enterprise Edition which will lead to further improvements in the contact centre. The identification of problem calls, quality control issues, the review of KPIs and future integration of social media sites will all help KCTMO to understand its customers perceptions of services offered throughout the borough.