Portman Building Society has deployed a unified
messaging system with speech-control capabilities to improve
productivity at its head office, customer service centre and across
its 114-strong branch network.
The Callxpress system lets staff manage their voicemails and
e-mails through a Microsoft Outlook front-end accessible via
telephone, wireless device or desktop PC. It also permits dial-up
voice-activated access to the Outlook inbox to specified users.
Inbound faxes are also integrated into Callxpress, which has
been linked to Portman's existing 12-port Rightfax Enterprise
system. This allows employees to manage their faxes through the
same inbox.
David Lincoln, group telecoms manager at Portman, said the
system was proving robust and would shortly be upgraded to cover 30
incoming ports rather than the current 20.
He said it had improved the productivity of workers across the
board. Among its advantages is out-of-hours voicemail, using a BT
Smartdivert facility to redirect calls to a central voicemail inbox
which then pushes out messages to the society's branch network.
"The advantage of the system is that you pay for the cost of the
diversion, but need no in-branch voicemail facility," said
Lincoln.
Portman's unified messaging system is integrated at the server
level using Microsoft Exchange 5.5. The system's various modules
can be deployed remotely to the society's 2,500 Windows XP desktops
on a user-by-user basis, using Tivoli as a software deployment
tool.