Purple Parking Case Study
New IP-based call centre solution boosts
bookings and enhances traveller services
Purple Parking is using a BT-provided Nortel solution to
enhance customer service for its market-leading ‘meet
and greet’ and ‘park and ride’ services
Executive Summary
Purple Parking, now established for 16
years, employs 500 people at its main
operation at Heathrow and books at 20
airports through its own and partner
organisations. It is the preferred supplier
for many travel management companies
providing facilities for corporates. In
addition to a ‘park and ride’ service,
Purple Parking offers a ‘meet and greet’
service with uniformed chauffeurs.
The company needed to replace its
business-critical phone system in order to
boost customer service and manage
growth. Purple Parking decided on a BTsupplied Nortel solution. The reassurance of
a one-stop-shop service together with
robustness, functionality, availability of
management information, future proofing
and after sales support influenced Purple
Parking’s decision.
The new contact centre, telephony and data
infrastructure gives Purple Parking
superlative customer call handling at all its
Heathrow sites. Regular business account
customers and leisure travellers are routed
to separate agents: visibility of call rates,
exceptional traffic and abandoned calls
means that managers can adjust services to
match demand and cope with demanding
corporate customers and hectic holiday
booking periods.
Industry sector:
Travel and logistics
Publication date:
January 2005
Page 1
Marketplace
The off-airport parking market is highly competitive. At
Heathrow alone there are 30 to 40 companies competing
for business; as well as ‘consolidators’ who take bookings
and broker them to car park operators. Purple Parking, now
established for 16 years, books at 20 airports through its
own and partner organisations. Most businesses in this
sector concentrate on the leisure traveller but Purple
Parking also has a niche market, as the preferred supplier
for many travel management companies providing facilities
for corporates. It is the largest provider in this area.
In addition to a ‘park and ride’ service, Purple Parking offers
a ‘meet and greet’ service for the corporate market.
Customers drive to the terminal to be met by a uniformed
chauffeur who will park the car and meet the customer on
their return – typically cutting an hour each way and making
a considerable time saving for the regular business traveller.
Purple Parking employs 500 people at its main operation at
Heathrow, including 250 chauffeurs. In total, the chauffeurs
will meet 3,000 clients in a typical business week.
Purple Parking Case Study
Business opportunity
Purple Parking is keen to make the best use of technology
to provide the best possible service for business travellers
and holidaymakers, and has used an e-commerce website
and online booking for many years. However, existing
phone systems were expensive to maintain and provided
only basic management information.
The company was looking for a robust multi-functional
system that could grow to match its rapid expansion,
incorporated advanced contact centre facilities and be
flexible enough to allow for constant changes in office
location. The new system would also have to offer
innovative features to attract and secure the corporate
market in the future.
have migrated all our outbound calls
“We
back to BT – all our lines are BT – and now
we have all our telephone equipment from
BT too. BT is big enough to give us the
support we need, and we know that they are
going to be there for the long haul.
Simon Eyles
Senior IT and Telecommunications
Manager Purple Parking
”
Since Purple Parking offers tailored services to businesses,
calls coming in from specific clients must be easy to
identify so that they can be answered appropriately, and be
separately monitored. Operations across the company’s
two sites and four buildings at Heathrow had to be as
streamlined as possible.
For the 40 agents and operators dealing with customer
calls, a virtual call centre with three distinct functions was
required. This would deal first with reservations and
secondly with freephone calls from returning travellers
needing buses back to the car park or a chauffeur service.
Thirdly a standard business switch was required for the
offices. Purple Parking also required free customer calls, a
helpline for last minute booking changes and lines for the
chauffeurs to ring in on.
BT solution
The new phone system would be a highly strategic
development for the company and a wide-ranging market
survey was launched. In approaching BT, Purple Parking
directors and senior managers visited the showcase in BT
Centre in the City of London to see a demonstration of a
Nortel solution; later there was a second session for technical
managers.
The company chose the Nortel solution over competitor
offerings on the basis of greater reliability and featurerichness, but other key factors were the quality of BT’s after
sales support – a BT CustomCare maintenance package
ensures two-hour 24*7 response – and having BT as a single
supplier for all telecommunications requirements. Finally, BT
and Nortel research and development programmes gave
Purple Parking confidence in the longevity of the solution.
Simon Eyles, Senior IT and Telecommunications Manager,
says: “We have migrated all our outbound calls back to BT – all
our lines are BT – and now we have all our telephone equipment
from BT too. Should we have a problem we just need to make
one phone call and there’s not a situation where there are
arguments as to whose responsibility it is. We have a single point
of contact with our account manager whom I talk to regularly.
BT is big enough to give us the support we need, and we know
that they are going to be there for the long haul.”
Industry sector:
Travel and logistics
Publication date:
January 2005
Page 2
The company purchased a Nortel solution comprising the
Succession 1000M call server for general telephony switching,
Symposium Call Centre server, Symposium Web Client,
CallPilot for Unified Messaging, BayStack Ethernet switches
for the LAN and IP Phones. Symposium Web Client reports on
Symposium statistics, sending real time and historical
information over the LAN to supervisors’ screens and to
Dacon wallboards to display queue statistics, which change
colour to draw attention to user-defined alerts. Purple Parking
has also purchased a range of 160 DDI numbers for office use.
A new computer room accommodates the Nortel equipment
and BT data specialists were brought in to work on the data
infrastructure to create a secure virtual LAN across the fourbuilding campus. Purple Parking is working with BT to
eliminate any single points of failure. The new computer room
containing the Succession 1000M and Symposium servers is
linked by an optical fibre connection back to an existing
computer room and the reservations building. The link from
the new computer room to the site of the chauffeur-drive
operation is a BT 10Mbps LAN extension service, with an
additional connection for redundancy.
At the main three-building site the system is now all IP-based.
The ‘meet and greet’ chauffeur-drive service is based four
miles away adjacent to the airport, and digital phones have
been installed to enable a fallback procedure.
Purple Parking Case Study
At the reservations call centre there are seats set
aside for overflow or to back up the chauffeur
operation. Staff with the right skill set can be
shifted there and, with the correct log in, can
continue to take the chauffeur calls. If the link
from the new computer room to the building
where the reservations call centre is situated
goes down, there are a number of phones in the
main building with agent capability so that agents
can move and a new mini-call centre can be
opened up.
Simon Eyles is already thinking about solution
enhancements. “Freephone calls made to Purple
Parking by people ready to be picked up from the airport
will be automated, so that customers simply key in responses
to questions, a facility that’s available on the Symposium.
“At the next stage, convergence between voice and data will
speed up the process even more. We’re looking at the customer
response being captured by the system, turned into a data file
and sent to the main reservation system to update the customer
record. A voice response will then be automatically generated
saying that the bus will collect the customer shortly. An
automatic alert would be transmitted to the bus driver. BT is big
enough to have the specialists in-house to continue the technical
development of our business needs.”
Results
Time is all-important and an ever-faster response to
customer needs is Purple Parking’s objective. In particular,
corporate clients need to be able to contact the company
at a moment’s notice. And since clients prefer phones to be
answered in their own name the ability of the Nortel
Symposium Call Centre to makes clients immediately
identifiable means that agents can answer quickly and
appropriately.
The job of the reservations manager has been made much
easier as she can see on her own screen which agents are
logged on, who is talking to a customer, and who is ready
to take another call. Placed on hold for any length of time,
potential customers may ring off and perhaps take their
business elsewhere. Previously calls were being lost. The
agents themselves find that visibility of calls waiting on the
wallboards – including the length of time the caller waiting
longest has been holding – has a marked effect on the
speed with which they manage calls.
Steve Waller, Sales and Marketing Director at Purple
Parking, says: “Feedback from the reservations team is that
they find it very, very useful, because it makes them more
aware of calls on hold. Now calls are answered far more
speedily. It’s a marked improvement. The team is becoming
more proactive more quickly than we had hoped. The number
of calls on hold has been vastly reduced, and more calls are
being picked up and converted into more bookings.”
Industry sector:
Travel and logistics
Publication date:
January 2005
Page 3
Why BT?
• One supplier provides all telecommunications
requirements. Regular meetings with an account manager
keep Purple Parking up-to-date and, in the event of a
problem, only one call needs to be made
• Management information from the Nortel systems gives
Purple Parking the agility to deal with calls appropriately
and stay ahead in a very competitive marketplace
• Ongoing research and development by BT and Nortel
provides the confidence that the system is right for the
long term and can be enhanced as technology develops
• Purple Parking’s confidence is boosted by the quality of
BT’s maintenance and after sales service
Reporting and management information has also proved
extremely valuable in allowing managers to make
immediately effective decisions with more precision and
actually anticipate problems. “In a service industry,” says
Steve Waller, “you can’t stand still. I need to see what sort of
calls are coming into the sales office, and be able to monitor
what’s going on and how we are dealing with those calls. Now
we can see where the peaks and troughs are, understand
where the business is coming from, and generally control our
call centre operation for maximum operational effectiveness.”
The ability to provide more efficient call handling and
better customer service is a key differentiator in a
competitive business. Speedier, more streamlined
processes are bringing Purple Parking the ability to grow
rapidly as demand for their services increases.
Steve Waller concludes: “With the BT solution we can expand
faster than was possible with our old system and do more
business within current staffing levels. The system is very
robust, gives us good value for money and the flexibility to
adapt as the markets change and we move forward.
Furthermore, the phone system is the company’s ‘bread and
butter’ and must be up and running at all times. We strongly
believe that there is no other operator in the business that
could give us greater confidence in their after sales service and
maintenance than BT.”
the BT solution we can expand faster
“With
than was possible with our old system and do
more business within current staffing levels.
The system is very robust, gives us good value
for money, and the flexibility to adapt as the
markets change and we move forward.
Steve Waller
Sales and Marketing Director
Purple Parking
”
Purple Parking Case Study
Main BT Products & Services
• Nortel Succession 1000M Call Server, Nortel Symposium
Call Centre Server, and Nortel AgentView Enterprise
software with two Dacon LED wallboards
• Nortel Symposium Web Client and Nortel CallPilot
Unified Messaging platform
• Nortel Succession Remote Office 9150
• Sixty i2004 IP phones and ten i2050 SoftPhones
• Virtual LAN created with Nortel BayStack Ethernet
switches, Passport 2430s and BayStack Business
Policy switches
• BT systems integration
Technology blueprint
Purple Parking owns three buildings on a
campus in Southall, Middlesex and a fourth
on a site four miles away. The Nortel
Symposium and Succession 1000M have been
set up in a new computer room on the main site
with calls presented on ISDN 30 lines. This is
linked by dark fibre to the existing computer room
where reservation information is stored, and to
the call centre where reservations are taken.
At the fourth building the ‘meet and greet’
operations are managed. This is linked to the
Nortel equipment and customer servers in the new
computer room by a 10Mbps BT LAN extension
service (LES) and a 256kbps back up link. A Nortel
Remote Office 9150 allows full remote access to
the Succession, CallPilot and Symposium Contact
Centre, using IP Telephony. At either end of these
links are Nortel BayStack Business Policy 2000
switches and Nortel Passport 2430 routers. An
ISDN 2 service into the Remote Office 9150
provides voice back up.
Contact & Further Information
To find out how we can help you with
the solutions and services outlined
Talk to your BT Account Manager
or call Convergent Solutions on
Freefone 0800 389 4848
Visit www.bt.com/convergentsolutions
Tell us if this datasheet was useful or how we can make things better
cs.marketing@bt.com
Nortel i2004 IP Phones offer extensive
functionality and connect to the network through
any available LAN port. IP SoftPhone 2050s
allows PCs to be used for voice communications
both onsite and remotely using the broadband
links. A Nortel BayStack 470 and seven Nortel
BayStack 460 switches provide inline power for
the IP Phones and LAN switches as well as
connectivity to PCs and servers.
Offices worldwide
Industry sector:
Travel and logistics
Publication date:
January 2005
Page 4
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