Mitel®, a leading provider of unified communications, has announced that Sydney-based Gizmo, a provider of in-home and phone-based technical support for a wide range of computer-related technologies, has successfully migrated to a fully fault tolerant Mitel unified communications solution to support the company’s rapid growth and improve the efficiency of their 10 Australian offices and large field services workforce.

Troy Cox, chief technology officer for Gizmo commented, “Gizmo’s goal is to help ordinary Australians, by sorting out the computer problems they run into at home. We are a young company that is growing fast, and need a flexible solution that helps our business grow.”

The core of Gizmo’s business is a contact centre located in its Sydney office. Operating seven days a week with 30 full-time employees, the contact centre handles all incoming customer requests, and provides comprehensive telephone-based support services to Gizmo’s clients.

Troy Cox continued, “Every piece of work we carry out starts with a support call to our contact centre, so downtime is incredibly damaging for our business. Mitel’s IP contact centre solution has made it easy for us to grow fast, and has helped improve team work between our contact centre specialists and field service technicians. Most importantly, our Mitel solution integrated easily with our Microsoft applications, and has never missed a beat.”

The complete contact centre and collocated data centre solution was designed and implemented by Essential Data and Voice, a Mitel solution provider and Microsoft Gold Partner. In addition, Essential Data and Voice provide Gizmo with complete ongoing support for the entire solution. The initial stages of the implementation occurred in August 2006. A major expansion of the solution was completed in September 2008, and included a migration to a fault tolerant design, and enhancements to the contact centre.

Gizmo’s entire business is supported by two Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) platforms in a fault tolerant configuration. One of the Mitel 3300 ICPs is located at Gizmo’s Sydney head office, with a second unit located in an offsite collocation data centre. HP ProCurve 5400 and 2626 series switches were deployed to deliver Power over Ethernet to every part of the network. The Mitel Teleworker Solution is used to support both employees working from home, and desktop phones at branch office locations.

Contact centre functionality is delivered via Mitel Contact Center Management Enterprise Edition, Intelligent Queue Enterprise Edition, Interactive Visual Queue Enterprise Edition, and Automatic Call Distribution. A call recording solution and screen capture solution have been integrated by CVT Global, and is used as a training tool for the contact centre. The entire system is integrated with email messaging and ActiveDirectory using Microsoft Office Communicator and Mitel Live Business Gateway. Field service technicians use Windows Mobile devices with Office Communicator Mobile, to access instant messaging and presence information, even when travelling.

Customer calls are handled with a two-step process. An initial prequalification stage is handled by a dedicated telephone team, and is used to broadly diagnose the type of problem faced by the caller before the call is handed across to a technical specialist. In the event the problem cannot be resolved via phone-based support, Gizmo is quickly able to schedule a home visit by one of their field service technicians.

Handling surges in incoming customer calls is a key challenge for Gizmo. Despite extended operating hours, and operating seven days a week, demand typically surges by 200 percent on Monday mornings, and by 150 percent on Friday afternoons.

To handle peak levels of demand, advanced queue handling has been implemented using Mitel Interactive Visual Queue Enterprise Edition. The contact centre manager is now able to dynamically adjust queue settings, and route calls to reduce customer delays. In addition, when Gizmo’s field services technicians are not scheduled for client appointments, they are seamlessly linked into the contact centre solution using Mitel’s teleworking technology. This allows Gizmo to better distribute incoming support requests in periods of peak demand, as well as improve customer service delivery and staff productivity for field service employees.

Gwilym Funnell, Mitel director Asia Pacific - business development and marketing commented, “To grow fast, businesses need to leapfrog their competition. By combining Mitel’s Contact Centre and Teleworking Solutions, businesses can dramatically improve employee productivity, while maintaining maximum flexibility, and the ability to quickly adjust to business changes.”

About Gizmo Gizmo is an Australian company that provides comprehensive in-home and phone based technical support for a wide range of technologies used in the home. Based in Sydney, Gizmo has 10 offices, and delivers services across Australia.

About Mitel Mitel delivers flexibility and simplicity in smart unified communications solutions and applications for organisations of all sizes. Mitel is reinventing how successful organisations gain competitive advantage by easily collaborating and communicating over distance and time with customers, colleagues and partners. Mitel’s (www.mitel.com) global headquarters are in Ottawa, Canada, with offices, partners, and resellers worldwide. - 30 - Mitel and logo are registered trademarks of Mitel Networks Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact: Sebastian Rice, 02 9959 1991, seb@silverspan.com, www.silverspan.com