Background:
The customer, a call centre business, was established 26 years ago and, today receives over 6 million calls per annum across various services, ranging from simple information and literature requests, to in-depth advice and support, all tailored to individual caller needs.

The Requirement:
The customer needed to consolidate a number of discrete voice and data legacy systems. The voice side ran on a TDM that carried 120 channels into HO with links to other sites via an IPRC card routing traffic over a fixed 2MB link. The Data network backbone ran on Microsoft networking and desktop platforms that powered data collation, delivery and back office applications such as e-mail, HR, Finance and resourcing.  Every one of these services was independent of each other and users logged into each separate database as well as each phone hunt groups. A new Avaya-based solution was prescribed by consultants but, with a £200,000 settlement sum due to be paid to the incumbent service provider to exit existing contracts, total project costs exceeded £700,000. The customer had a tight budget and needed to pay for the infrastructure plus settlement costs over 7 years.

The Solution:
AFM Solutions worked with its Managed Services Partner (MSP) and wrote a managed services contract that incorporated support and maintenance plus the depreciation in the new set-up. This contract carried the fixed charges needed for AFM to fund the project.  After a long installation and commissioning period, our MSP was able to make a sale of the equipment to AFM equating to the costs of the project plus profit.

Benefits to Customer:

• The customer pays the fixed charge element of the service charge as part of its monthly budget.
• The whole cost of the Avaya call centre was funded in line with the customer’s budgets.

Benefits to MSP:

• The transaction delivered £714,000 of cash, revenue and associate profit to our MSP partner in the face of severe customer budget challenges. This was a true sale with no recourse to our partner in respect of customer default.
• Our MSP partner regains control of the equipment at the end of the financing period having agreed a repurchase option with AFM at a nominal sum.