Auckland Council has revealed the value of a contract with Vodafone/TelstraClear to consolidate its call centres.
The five-year contract is worth $5,551,906.00. The value was disclosed by the council in response to an official information request by Computerworld. When the contract was first announced in December last year the council refused to disclose the value, claiming it was "commercially sensitive".
In the original press statement, the council estimated that "investing in this call centre solution will have an overall benefit of $7.3 million as well as making its customer contact systems more efficient."
"The systems we inherited at the time of amalgamation no longer serve an organisation of Auckland Council's size and we will replace it with a single cost-effective model that'll serve our needs for years," said manager of customer services Nigel King in the statement.
In a Request for Expression of Interest for a city-wide contact centre operation released by the council in December 2011, it said there were three core call centre platforms at Grey's Avenue, Henderson and Manukau, each with intelligent links to the Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise hosted by Gen-i. Telephony in eight contact centres located around Auckland was supplied by Nortel, Ericsson, Cisco and Avaya.
The document also said it is expected around 300 agents will work in contact centres around the city, handling an annual volume of work that includes:
" around 3 million calls to the call centre team,
" 77, 235 calls to the IS service desk,
" and 164,274 written contacts to the written communication team.
In a statement welcoming the deal, TelstraClear notes that it was bought by Vodafone last month and that Vodafone has been delivering mobile voice and data services to the council for two years. "When added to the call centre partnership, Auckland Council is enjoying the benefits of TelstraClear and Vodafone combined."