With nearly a century of experience providing low-cost, reliable electric service to millions of homes and businesses in the Mid-Atlantic, Allegheny Energy is an established leader in the energy industry. Headquartered in Greensburg, PA, their vision is to be a top performing utility by year-end 2007.
To realize that, the company has focused on leveraging technology to reduce expenses, increase revenues and improve service. In 1997, they began a multi-phased process to design, build and integrate several solutions to enhance the effectiveness of their 250-seat call center. The resulting architecture included several home-grown and third-party products that were integrated into a comprehensive system. Representatives processed roughly 65,000 customer contacts weekly from Allegheny's five-state service area.
The system's backbone was a Nortel Meridian 1 PBX equipped with Meridian Link and basic ACD. The system also included CCR, Meridian MAX, a Nortel IVR, a home-grown CRM application and a variety of third-party solutions for screen-popping, workforce management, readerboards, and automated call monitoring and recording. When Chrysalis Software was introduced to Allegheny in 2004, several of the firm's contact center components were nearing end-of-life. They were engaged to facilitate a transformation of the operation so the firm could continue to offer its growing customer base excellent service.
As partners, there were several challenges. Allegheny's operation was highly complex, consisting of multiple solution components from several different vendors. In addition, operation was mission critical; they could not afford disruptions for any material amount of time. Chrysalis minimized the inherent risks of introducing new applications and provided project management and systems integration expertise.
The solution permitted Allegheny to leverage much of its existing investment while optimizing the benefits of new technologies. It included Symposium Call Center Server 5.0, several components of the Chrysalis Sonata CTI product suite, a custom-developed real-time data interface to provide IVR visibility on call center statistics, and systems integration to ensure that third-party products worked successfully.
Callers are offered self-service through the IVR, while those needing assistance are transferred to the call center. Using sophisticated routing, the Symposium connects the caller to the agent best-suited to handle her concerns. Based on expertise, a representative may be assigned any or all of up to 17 different skillsets. The Sonata CTI solution is used to pop a screen of information about the caller simultaneously with the call's arrival at the agent's phone.