Lafarge Aggregates Ltd, part of the worldwide Lafarge Group, is one of the UK's leading providers of construction materials with over 200 sites across the UK. The company produces a range of construction materials including crushed rock, sand & gravel, ready-mixed concrete and asphalt as well as offering road surfacing services.

Two and a half years ago the company consolidated its head-office operations from three services centres to one building at Granite House in Leicester. Encompassing a 200 strong Trading Floor team, responsible for managing all of its customer relations such as quotations and the status of placed orders, the company also operates two satellite offices.

The challenge

Crucial to the Trading Floor's success is the harnessing of its interactions with customers, as Telephony Services Manager at Lafarge Aggregates, Helen Brawn explains: "By capturing 100% of customer interactions we have the opportunity to analyse our customer's requirements, which ultimately means we can keep developing the service we offer." Prior to the move to Granite House, Lafarge used Racal Recorders, however, it recognised that a new building should be complemented with the latest technology to future-proof the business.

Finding a robust solution that could efficiently manage the two million inbound calls and further two million outbound calls Lafarge receives and dials each year was a considerable undertaking. A dedicated team was given six-months to find the right solution.

Lafarge had some very specific and challenging demands of its required solution, as Helen Brawn elaborates: "During a telephone enquiry it may be necessary to place a customer on hold for a short time or to transfer them to another part of the business." She adds: "We needed to ensure that the transfer was incorporated into the captured interaction, to maintain an accurate account of events and provide a transparent record to the customer. Also, as we were centralising our offices we wanted a system that could be administered centrally."

The solution

Lafarge prides itself on providing every customer with one-to-one service and manages in excess of 800 direct-dial telephone numbers. In addition to updating its interaction capture solution, the decision was made to overhaul the entire telephony system. "We selected the DEFINITY Avaya G3r telephony system and the fact that NICE had proven credentials integrating with the Avaya system was a major factor in our decision to make NICE our supplier of choice," adds Helen Brawn.

"NICE was able to provide Lafarge with the solutions, services and expertise. They are also recognised as a world leader," states Telecoms Analyst at Lafarge Aggregates, Peter Clarke. "NICE solutions offered us the flexibility of a modular approach, enabling us to start at a base level of simply capturing the telephone interaction and then adding further functionality, such as capturing the screen as the business case demanded."

The NICE team worked closely with Lafarge throughout the implementation and were faced with several obstacles that needed to be overcome, Pete Clarke continues: "Because we were centralising the calls from three sites we encountered an initial problem of calls tromboning, however this was quickly resolved. The main challenge was how to seamlessly record complete interactions that integrated any internal calls made whilst the customer was on-hold."

The benefits

Today this ability to capture, search and retrieve telephone calls has had a major impact on the performance of Lafarge's customer Trading Floor operations. Helen Brawn adds: "We are now in the ideal position where if we need to access a current or old order, we can quickly search and retrieve the entire interaction and send it via email to the customer or internal department quickly, efficiently and to the customer's satisfaction. This is vital function of our Trading Floor operations."

As Lafarge had already used quality monitoring to improve customer interactions the NICE system was very well received, giving everyone on the Trading Floor the ability to listen and grade their own calls, evaluate good and bad customer interactions, learn and improve their skills. "We have high staff retention on the Trading Floor and are able to further improve our productivity service and employee satisfaction through tailoring our training programmes to the specific requirements of the individual," comments Helen Brawn.

Pete Clarke concludes: "NICE has fully met every expectation we detailed in our brief. The success of the interaction capture has lead us to looking at increasing our capabilities with NICE, for example utilising its screen capture capability to provide a new dimension to our interaction capture."