Case Study: Sky Betting

The challenge

As an expanding business, which engages with a varied audience, it is important that each and every customer interaction runs smoothly. It is in Sky Betting & Gaming’s best interest to ensure that all calls are answered quickly in a resilient environment to ensure business continuity. The previous supplier’s solution had served its purpose but had come to the end of its life. The need to deliver a new Contact Centre solution was clear; however due to the timings of office lease renewals, there was a very limited timeframe in which to plan and undertake the deployment. For Kcom this provided the opportunity to illustrate its flexible and collaborative approach to service provision, thereby helping Sky Betting & Gaming fulfil its growth and customer experience ambitions.

Within the scope of the project, Sky Betting & Gaming needed to:

• make sure its Contact Centre solution was absolutely efficient and totally reliable
• ensure that the company could trust in the resilience of any new solution
• enhance its business continuity strategy
• improve reliability for customers
• interact with the service
• provide a system that was friendly to desk agents.

Supporting all these objectives, Sky Betting & Gaming was seeking to refine its business model using intelligence derived from call flow and call traffic. This would enable mapping of factors such as periods of peak traffic, missed customer interactions and levels of call diversion. All of these would feed into the provision of a better service, which in turn would allow the generation of more revenue and the development of future business opportunities. 

Kcom's solution

Kcom was unique in its ability to implement a Cisco Call Manager solution despite the challenging timeframe. Working collaboratively with Sky Betting & Gaming’s in-house IT personnel, Kcom was able to produce a highly tailored solution that met the required functionality and scalability, with a series of delivery milestones in place to enforce key deadlines. Despite the limited time available to design, agree and deploy the solution, the new Contact Centre went live on the delivery date as agreed.

Kcom’s staff worked both onsite and offsite to balance rapid deployment with the reassurance of an on-the-ground presence – remote configuration was used to expedite the process while onsite testing was completed in parallel. Having staff in multiple locations ensured that all equipment could be distributed to different sites in a highly organised fashion, with time saved by having the right engineers in the right place at precisely the right time. Once the solution was in place, preparatory and on-the-day training was provided by Kcom. This ensured a technically smooth transition and enabled Contact Centre staff to immediately benefit from the new functionality the system delivers. 

Backing a sure winner

"The functionality delivered by the Cisco Call Manager solution is now an integral service within Sky Betting & Gaming,” says Richard Harpin, Senior IT Project Manager, Sky Betting & Gaming. 

The new Contact Centre solution has all but eliminated the risk of dropped calls, which minimises the chance of lost business. Thanks to the improved functionality provided by Cisco Call Manager, Kcom’s implementation has maximised the ability of Sky Betting & Gaming’s agents to take calls and manage them. For example, the telephony system supported Sky Betting & Gaming during last year’s Grand National, which is always the busiest day of the year for bookmakers. Critically the business is also ideally positioned to track call data, which supports its business planning requirements.

Behind the immediate revenue generation benefits is the robustness and resilience needed by the business to secure its customer relationships and generate reliable revenue streams. Thanks to the intelligent design of the solution, the chances of Cisco Contact Centre Manager failing are at an absolute minimum. However, Sky Betting & Gaming has the reassurance of a safety net. Sitting underneath Contact Centre Manager is a backup, mirrored system, which de-risks the company’s position by allowing business to continue as usual in the unlikely event that a fault should occur.