Call centre will take on billing

By ADAM GIFFORD

Multinational call centre specialist Sitel Corporation is creating an 80-seat customer contact centre and billing system in Hamilton for electricity retailer Genesis Power.

Sitel will take over responsibility for billing Genesis retail and commercial customers from Natural Gas Corp on July 1.

New Zealand managing director Russell Just said Sitel, whose other big contract in this country is running operator services for Telecom, worked as an independent firm bringing together technology to do a particular job.

For the Genesis job it is working with Sanderson, which supplies the Gentrack billing software, hardware supplier Compaq, implementer KPMG Consulting and CallTime Solutions, which supplies the software for the call centre.

"That's one of these new all-singing, all-dancing, multimedia new-generation PABX environments, which is essentially software on an NT server," Mr Just said.

CallTime general manager Bill Garcia said his company's communications server would allow Sitel staff to manage customer services using multiple channels, including phone, fax, e-mail and web-chat.

The system will also be integrated with workforce management, billing and other core applications.

It is the ninth CallTime site in this country.

Other customers are ANZDL Shipping, and the Fujitsu service centre.

Mr Just said Genesis Power's billing systems would be transferred from the older Gentrack implementation used by NGC to a new version with a graphical user interface.

This version allowed customer self-service through interactive voice systems or the internet, so they could check or pay bills or do their own meter readings.

Sitel would also oversee moving the time-of-use billing for commercial customers from the existing PV2 system to a new module in Gentrack.