27 July 2009

LONDON - Newcastle Building Society has selected Nortel* [OTC: NRTLQ] to provide a new virtual contact center to enhance communications between office locations and improve customer satisfaction. The Nortel solution, based on unified communications technology, is helping Newcastle Building Society boost its award-winning customer service by further improving responsiveness and reducing customer waiting times.

Newcastle Building Society, with assets under management in excess of ?5.09 billion, is the tenth largest and one of the strongest mutual building societies in the UK. Since it was established in 1861, the society has made customer service a top priority. When the building society expanded to a new site on the outskirts of Newcastle in June 2008, maintaining and enhancing customer satisfaction was a key consideration in selecting a new communications system. The new Nortel solution better connects agents, improves productivity, while reducing operating costs.

"We encourage our customers to choose whichever contact method they feel most comfortable with or is most suitable for them, " said Ian Kilmartin, Third Party Services executive at Newcastle Building Society. "Many customers find that even when operating their accounts on line they like to have a phone number for convenience so we searched for technology that could route customer calls to the right agent straight away. The new solution from Nortel has only been live for a few months but I can already see improvements and most importantly our customers can too."

By connecting the new site with the central offices, the Nortel solution ensures customers experience the same quality of service no matter which office they are contacting. The solution also improves the call waiting times for many customers because if all lines are busy in the contact center, the customer call is answered at society's central branch. In addition, customers can take advantage of a call back service allowing them to elect to be called back at their preferred time instead of waiting to speak to an agent.

"Nortel's expertise in contact centers has served the Newcastle Building Society well in the past and we are very pleased to be able to continue to help them secure the increasing levels of personal service and satisfaction that their customers expect," said Mario DiMascio, vice president, Enterprise Sales, Northern Europe. "With the upgraded solution from Nortel, the society can benefit from optimized resources and greater reliability. In fact, the new contact center is already working well in the face of increased call volumes since its installation."

Newcastle Building Society's call center, based on Nortel's Communication Servicer 1000 and Contact Center 6.0 solutions, includes Nortel Call Back to deliver enhanced self-service capabilities, built-in call analysis and a solid platform from which the customer can develop unified communications applications.

Nortel

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