RIYADH: Saudi Arabian Airlines has achieved a 30 percent reduction in operating costs as a result of upgrading its four contact centers — Riyadh, Damman, Madinah and Jeddah — with new IP telephony and contact centre solutions.
The new solutions were programmed by Avaya, a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services.
“The Unified Communications technology we have implemented from Avaya includes IP telephony applications and Modular Messaging for more than 1,200 users over 15 sites across the Kingdom,” said Dr. Omar Abdullah Al-Jefri, IT vice president for Saudi Airlines.
“There are more than 12,000 IP endpoints across the network, and we plan to increase the number of endpoints to 14,000 over the next 12 months. In addition, we have 355 call center agents working in four centers, and we plan to add 100 more agents next year,” he added.
“Avaya’s solution has helped us to lower operating costs, reduce network fees and increase transparency across our contact centers. The centralized Call Management System based in Jeddah allows for the monitoring of all four contact centers from one single location. However, all centers can be managed from any of the four locations across the network,” Jefri explained, adding that the highly-available platform is redundant, meaning there is a backup of the centralized call management system located in Riyadh in case of outages at any of the main contact centers.
“Avaya managed the entire implementation cycle of the contact center solutions which will provide superlative service for Saudi Airline customers,” Nidal Abou-Ltaif, area vice president of Emerging Markets for Avaya, said.
“With the IP-based contact center architecture, call center agents can use soft-phones instead of analogue phones, further improving cost reduction. Saudi Airlines has also reduced hardware, software, maintenance and internal support costs and fees by reducing the number of on-site support as a result of centrally managing their contact centers,” he added.
