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“Housing most of our infrastructure at Macquarie Telecom has enabled us to really drive our business growth. It would be incredibly hard to scale at the speed we are if we had to worry about uptime and the security of our infrastructure.”
Dan Turner, Managing Director, Unity4 Pty Ltd
Overview
Unity4 is an Australian call centre service provider with a difference.
The company has developed a unique ‘homeshore’ model to deliver call centre services to
some of Australia’s largest business and government organisations. This solution taps a
neglected segment of the labour market to provide its customers with a cost-effective,
high quality, Australian call centre alternative.
Under the Unity4 model, call centre operators field calls from their homes all across
Australia. Its operators live in both metropolitan and regional areas ranging from Bondi
to Tennant Creek and Wagga Wagga to Wollongong. Unlike traditional operators, Unity4
agents are typically aged between 35–55 years and 75 per cent are tertiary qualified. The
turnover rate is less than five per cent – compared to the 200–300 per cent outsource
industry average.
“A lot of people who wouldn’t consider working in a traditional call centre will work
from home,” said Managing Director of Unity4, Dan Turner. “That includes sea-changers,
stay-at-home mums and physically disabled people that may not be able to commute to work.”
“Our approach is simple. We find great people, give them the ideal working situation,
and then provide our clients with the most highly skilled, happy, loyal and responsive
workforce in the industry,” said Turner.
With 250 employees spread across Australia, Unity4 handles millions of calls each year
for clients such as NRMA Careflight and Virgin Money.
The Challenge
In just six years since the company was founded, Unity4 has experienced rapid business
growth, expanding at a rate of more than 75 per cent per annum. The company’s unique
staffing model is key to its ability to deliver exceptional service and therefore win,
grow and retain customers.
The mission critical part of Unity4’s service however, is its RapportCMS IP-based call
centre management system which incorporates predictive diallers, ACD, CRM and integrated
business management system.
“Call centres are about service and efficiency. Community based staffing is just one
part of the equation. Our operators can only do the great job they do because they are
empowered by world leading technology,” said Turner.
RapportCMS is a combination of a robust SQL database, a Microsoft .NET interface and a
Asterisk telephony, email and fax server, which enables integration and data transfer to
client-managed systems.
The web-based application emulates traditional hardware-based contact centre platforms.
Regardless of the geographical location of each operator, RapportCMS means they have real
time, online access to all the intelligence needed to effectively and efficiently deal
with customers and prospects.
“We had all the application, telephony and web servers that run RapportCMS in our head
office,” said Turner. “At the rate we have been growing, moving our infrastructure in to a
Tier-1 facility was a logical decision.”
“Our strength is in call centre management and technology development. It was clearly
time to keep our team focused on what they are good at and let someone else manage the
infrastructure,” added Turner.
“Security is critical for our customers. So we couldn’t compromise that by putting our
infrastructure anywhere that wasn’t world class.”
Unity4 also needed an environment that would give it scope for further expansion while
having continuous access to interrupted power supply and relevant cooling without worrying
about costs.
“We were not interested in a ‘plug and play’ solution that most hosting providers could
supply. We have very specific need and we were looking for flexibility,” said Turner. “Our
value proposition is worthless if we compromise on business continuity or security.”
Unity4 wanted to house their infrastructure in a data centre that integrated into a
core data and voice network so they could ensure they provide clients the best possible
service.
The Solution
Unity4 visited a range of data centres and found Macquarie Telecom had the
infrastructure, security and proven processes to cost-effectively meet all of its
requirements.
“We initially took some voice services to Macquarie Telecom and were impressed. We then
moved a large percentage of our local, national and international voice services to them
as they really delivered on the promise of cost effective, quality service,” said Turner.
“Given our experience we knew Macquarie Telecom had an absolute focus on smooth service
delivery. Their data centre is fully accredited with already proven possesses and
third-party certifications including AS 7799 and DSD Gateway so it was not a difficult
decision to move a large component our IT infrastructure to them.”
At the centre of Macquarie Telecom’s solution is its secure data centre, which
addressed Unity4’s need for scalability and security. Its uninterruptible power supply,
failover technologies, multiple network connectivity, cooling system and guaranteed uptime
for mission-critical applications provided everything Unity4 needed.
Because of Unity4’s distributed real time network, having a redundant data network is
critical to ensuring call centre agents can access the RapportCMS agent desk top.
“Macquarie Telecom was the only provider that could house our infrastructure and
provide the multi-carrier network redundancy that matched with our business model,” said
Turner.
Results
By letting Macquarie Telecom manage the bulk of its infrastructure, Unity4 no longer
has to worry about space limitations and can focus on growing its business.
“Housing most of our infrastructure at Macquarie Telecom has enabled us to really drive
our business growth,” Turner explains. “It would be incredibly hard to scale at the speed
we are if we had to worry about uptime and the security of our infrastructure.”
“One of the first questions our prospects ask is always about the security of their
data. The credibility of having our mission critical application servers in Macquarie
Telecom’s accredited data centre is critical to us winning large corporate customers,”
said Turner.
Unity4 is also looking to expand its use of Macquarie Telecom services. It will shift
offices in 2007, and will make the move to Macquarie Telecom’s Metro Access Network – a
dedicated business and government intelligent IP network that sets a new standard in speed
and affordability.
“We choose Macquarie Telecom as their business VoIP technology roadmap was absolutely
in synch with our business requirements to deliver voice call over a data network with
guaranteed quality of service,” said Turner. | 
