Sime Travel Singapore Pte Ltd. office faces a problem that many companies would love to have. A tremendous growth in business over the past couple of years is threatening to overwhelm the company?s existing infrastructure.

Established in 1973, Sime Travel is part of the Sime Darby Group and a founder-shareholder of Radius, the world?s largest travel company with a combined sales volume of over US$21 billion.

The Sime Travel Singapore office started with 16 agents armed with a key-telephone system to handle its business in Singapore. The agents dealt with a mixture of Sime?s corporate as well as retail clientele. From this humble 16, Sime had expanded its operations over the past couple of years and now plans to increase to 120 agents by year-end.

The number of calls handled by the contact center handle has also grown from 150-200 calls per day to an average of 600-800 calls per days. To cope with this surge, Sime relocated its operations from Shaw Center at Beach Road to its new call center at Market Street today.

Moving into the new call center, Sime decided to embrace VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) as a solution to streamline its contact center-related processes and to utilize information from its backend servers, said Marvin Lee, senior manager, Sime Travel Corporate Ticketing.

As business grew, so did Sime?s customer databases -- to so much that a proper management and execution procedure had to be implemented to handle these databases.

The databases were housed in back office applications and Sime planned to move itself away from an environment of multiple applications with complex green-screen interfaces that had limited or no external integration capabilities.

According to Lee, these ?stovepipe? applications were often a hindrance to customer service representatives trying to deliver accurate and complete answers to customers quickly. And it would only get worse as the databases got larger.

Sime needed the new system to be able to facilitate its main business functions for taking orders, providing instructions, scheduling service, processing subscriptions, making reservations, administering customer retention benefits and many other business-critical functions. The prime objectives were to ensure the best customer experience, improve operational workflows and reducing costs.

Sime eventually settled for the Avaya Elite Contact Centre with VOIP capabilities. With the new call center, Sime is expected to increase the volume of calls handled by at least 50 percent using Avaya IP Telephony S8500 Media Server. The results of the calls are tabulated into reports that can be reviewed and also serves as training tools and materials which continually evolves as the business grows. The reporting capabilities also allow Sime to be able to better plan its resources and to size its contact center growth.

In the event of a disaster, the VOIP system will also enables Sime to deploy disaster recovery sites using IP home agents.

According to Lee, among the benefits of call center modernization are: over 50 percent increase in productivity for its booking call center; streamlining and prioritization of customers, depending on whether they were making a booking or making enquiries. The system also frees the agents to handle more business related calls as time per call has been reduced by an average of 20 per cent.

Cabling infrastructure cost was also reduced with only one common cable point needed for both the PC and the phone. Likewise, hardware maintenance cost was cut by more than 30 per cent and relocation, moves, adds and changes can now be done through soft programming.

Going forward, Sime believes that with the new platform, it is ready for IP applications to ride on the VOIP contact center. With its IP telephony infrastructure in place, it is now exploring ways to further enhance its service capabilities by providing multiple channels of communication to improve its customers? experiences with its call center.