Case Study: Callsys Call Centre Platform
Short form
In 1999, every call centre in Australia was managed through the rear-view mirror: reports arrived up to twenty minutes after the calls they described. Redgum worked with Callsys, from 1998 to 2004, to build the first live management platform in the Australian market, one that showed managers every call as it happened. It gave Callsys a unique product to sell alongside their PABX hardware, won an ATUG industry award, and let flagship customers like Optus, Caltex and Shell run 200-seat operations with six or seven managers instead of the thirty the old ratios demanded.
The challenge
Callsys sold PABX systems and the hardware that call centres ran on, for operations anywhere from six seats to hundreds. The state of the art was a report: some minutes after the calls had come and gone, the computer would tell you how many reached an operator, how many were answered inside the grade of service, and how many were lost. Every manager on the floor was steering by that report, working hard, and working entirely on history. You cannot pull someone off a break to catch a call that rang out fifteen minutes ago.
Callsys came to us wanting parity: something that matched what the rest of the market sold. Redgum’s contribution started before the code, with the product strategy. Our advice was that the same build effort could produce a category leader rather than a catch-up, and that is what we designed for.
What we built
A call entering the building appeared on the manager’s screen as it arrived. The system knew which line it came in on, sales or support, and routed it accordingly. It identified the caller from their number and tried to connect them back to the one or two people they had spoken to before. For the first time, a manager could see four calls sitting unanswered and act while they were still ringing. Management stopped being an inquest and became a live activity.
The platform was modular and pluggable from version one, and that decision paid twice. Because the PABX interface was just a module, we could swap it for a database of every call the system had ever logged and replay an entire year of real traffic over a weekend, so versions two and three shipped hardened against reality. And the same modularity made new products cheap to add: predictive outbound dialling, agent scripting, and multi-client capability that put the right client’s script in front of an agent the moment their call arrived. Today that is table stakes. In 1999 it was unheard of.
The outcome
The old model locked managers to operators in a fixed ratio: six operators, one manager, and the two grew in lockstep. On this platform, the flagship sites, including the big oil companies, scaled to around 200 operators with six or seven managers. For anyone charging per call or per month, competing against a centre with a fraction of your management overhead is a losing position, and Callsys customers held that advantage for years.
For Callsys it was a unique product in the mid-to-large market, customers of the calibre of Optus, Caltex and Shell, and a point of difference no other PABX vendor could offer. The platform also won an ATUG industry award, with a story worth telling straight: as part of a later deal the product was rebranded by another company as Spearhead, and it was that company that submitted it for the award. Our code, their accolade. The award is real evidence of what the platform was; the name on the certificate is evidence of how deals work.