NSC beds down Virgin deal

NSC Group has inked a unified communications deal with Virgin Blue, which it claims is one of its most significant customer contracts to date.

The integrator will supply Avaya contact centre technology and Polycom video-conferencing equipment as part of a five-year managed services agreement.

NSC managing director, Craig Neil, could not disclose how much the deal was worth but said it was one of the 10 biggest deals that NSC has done.

Other contenders for the deal included Nortel and Cisco in conjunction with channel partner, Touchbase, Neil said.

“The integration covers everything across Virgin Blue from administration to its call centre, airport terminals, engineering and the new V Australia airline,” he said.

“We’re adding more benefits to its business outside of telephony such as within the business process area and improving a lot of their customer engagement experience.”

Technology being rolled out includes Avaya Communications Manager, dual S8730 media servers, S8730 and S8500 Enterprise Survivable Servers providing full redundancy, IP gigabit handsets on desktop and softphones, Verint call recording and Avaya reporting.

Neil said NSC also used some of its own business process engineering tools, which focused on Virgin’s back-end infrastructure and integrated that with the airline’s ticketing and flight information systems.

“Not all of the applications have been turned on yet, but we’ll see a significant increase in customer satisfaction in Virgin Blue customers. The real benefits will be measured over the next six months,” Neil said.

As part of the deal, two NSC engineers will be working on-site at Virgin Blue to conduct all the reporting and up-keep of the unified communications equipment and services, Neil said.