LONDON -- Sabio, the innovative contact centre services and solutions company has won a £1.8 million contract to design, implement and support a major integrated multimedia IP contact centre solution for Leeds City Council - the second largest metropolitan local authority in England. Avaya Inc. (NYSE:AV), a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services, will provide Avaya Interaction Center on the Avaya Communication Manager IP telephony platform, which will enable Leeds City Council to meet customer service needs and its electronic service delivery targets. This will improve significantly customer access to the Council, by providing access for all residents through a wider choice of communication methods including e-mail, voice and the web.

The Sabio-designed multimedia contact centre solution will provide the citizens in Leeds with multimedia access to key services including housing, social services, environmental services, council tax and benefit services. The council's goal is to handle and successfully resolve 80 per cent of enquiries at the first point of contact without referral to back-office specialists. The council selected Avaya Platinum business partner Sabio to deliver this major project following an OGC based procurement process, and from a shortlist that included over four vendors.

Sabio worked closely with Leeds City Council to design a contact centre approach that would make it easier for citizens to access Council services and information. The new Leeds City Council contact centre is based on Avaya Communication Manager IP telephony software and Avaya Interaction Center. It will see seven existing call centres consolidated into a single contact centre accommodating up to 250 agents and 70 back office staff, capable of handling in excess of 30,000 incoming calls per week. The interoperability of Avaya's Interaction Center means the council can easily integrate its existing Cisco LAN, WAN and Siebel CRM application with elements of the new Sabio solution hosted in the Affiniti data centre. The infrastructure will enable IP voice connectivity across the Council's corporate network.

This multimedia approach is key to delivering the Council's goal of providing access for all residents through a wide choice of communication methods. The Sabio solution also includes a comprehensive workforce optimisation component, based on Witness Systems' Impact 360 technology, to help the Council optimise the performance of its agents, processes and technologies. Sabio will implement a single, easy-to-use optimisation solution that incorporates workforce management technology to help the Council schedule and roster its complex staff environment.

Sabio will provide Leeds City Council with ongoing support for all of the systems and applications for the next five years under a managed services contract. As part of this, Sabio will also offer on-site resource for the first 18 months to assist and train the support team in the administration of the new solution.

"In addition to selecting the right technologies for our new contact centre, we also knew that we needed to work with a specialist partner who could help turn our new technology into a best practice customer contact centre. Sabio clearly demonstrated its strong contact centre expertise, its ability to design and implement successful solutions based on core contact centre systems and applications such as Avaya, and a determination to help us meet our targets for joined-up service delivery to our customers," commented Paul Goode, Contact Centre Project Manager for Leeds City Council. "Sabio's deep understanding of current contact centre best practice ensured we selected a solution that will provide us with a powerful IP telephony platform for our current and future contact centre requirements, as well as strong integration with our existing data network.

"Our new IP contact centre will help enable a major service transformation for the citizens of Leeds, and Sabio's customer-focused' approach has helped us to align all our people, processes and technology and work towards achieving our electronic service delivery targets," he added.

Sabio Ltd.

Avaya Inc.