Need for increased call centre productivity
As the nation 's leader in global telecommunications, Belgacom SA is relied upon by a large section of Belgium 's population and business community to provide local, intercity and international voice, data and cellular telephone services.

On the directory enquiry side alone, the company 's Directory Assistance Call Centre deals with 42 million calls each year from people requiring telephone numbers of subscribers.

Interactive voice system
The IVR application that was developed by ISX Inc. is based on the IBM WebSphere Voice Response voice processing platform and provides a capability to satisfy Belgacom 's two principal requirements -automatic number announcement and call completion.

The Belgacom Directory Assistance Centre aims to respond to every customer call within two seconds and provide the information requested in under 35 seconds. Directory assistance is offered in 4 languages with each their own access code: 1207 for Dutch, 1307 for French, 1407 for German, and 1405 for English. Once a customer has dialled the service, spoken to the call centre agent, and given the name and location of the subscriber, the agent informs the caller that the number has been found. A recorded voice then reads out the number to the caller.

The message also offers the caller a menu of numbered options, one of which is call completion which enables the caller to be connected automatically to the person whose number has just been given by Directory Assistance.

"The introduction of the WebSphere Voice Response solution enables us to offer the caller a replay of the message within the IVR application, which gives us the opportunity to generate additional revenues, "says Guido Vermeire. "But call completion is the real 'killer ' application for the service as nearly 60 per cent of callers now choose this option from the IVR menu, and this generates considerable additional traffic on our network,"he adds.

Omilia Services
The solution has been in production with success for some time, running on 2 IBM RS/6000 servers. Omilia was brought in to migrate the platform to WebSphere Voice Response for AIX v3.1, while upgrading the capacity of the servers.

About Belgacom
Belgacom SA, headquartered in Brussels, the heart of Europe, is the leading supplier of global telecommunications solutions on the Belgian market. The company is owned by the Belgian state (50% + one share) and ADSB Telecommunications (50% - one share), an international consortium made up of SBC, Singapore Telecom, TeleDanmark and a group of investors from the financial sector.