First in Africa for brandhouse and ATIO
9 October 2006

brandhouse, among the fastest growing alcoholic beverage companies in South Africa, has replaced its call centre with the newest in dynamic and innovative contact centre technology.

Brandhouse is the South African joint venture between Diageo, Heineken and Namibia Breweries, with an a portfolio of over 40 premium alcohol brands including Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, J&B, Bell's, Windhoek, Heineken, Captain Morgan and Jose Cuervo.

Substantial growth experienced over the past two years and the desire to build unrivalled partnerships with their customers, led brandhouse to the realisation that the current system no longer met business needs. Following six months of exhaustive research and product evaluation from various suppliers, brandhouse finally settled on a Customer Interaction Centre® (CIC) solution, custom-designed by ATIO Corporation, an Interactive Intelligence Inc. (Nasdaq: ININ) platinum partner and leaders in contact centre technology. According to Sipho Masinga, Business Support Services Manager for brandhouse, "It was important to partner with a vendor who had the right skills and the right technology - we really needed the correct partnership in terms of flexible and affordable Service Level Agreements." Masinga believes that ATIO's solution and support expertise would ensure a successful implementation, technical support, integration, customisation and operation of the call centre.

In his speech at the official launch of the new contact centre in Johannesburg, brandhouse's André Pasman, National Order to Cash Manager said, "ATIO understands our business processes. Their methodology has delivered the best possible value-add and cost effective solution to brandhouse. We want to be number one in the industry and we want to have the best call centre and order-to-cash outward facing team in the fast moving consumable goods market space. This solution is world-class and will drive and deliver a competitive advantage to brandhouse within the local market."

André Le Roux, MD of the ICS division at ATIO Corporation says, "There are many similarities between brandhouse and ATIO. We are two dynamic companies sharing similar business values and cultures; we both want to be the best in our respective industries." After careful consideration of brandhouse's business processes and requirements, ATIO recommended CIC. The consolidated platform includes powerful interaction management capabilities for telephone calls, faxes, email messages, Internet text chats and Web call-back requests. Sophisticated technology, such as the ground-breaking workforce management tool, advanced automatic dialing, multimedia resource load balancing and on-screen recording capabilities offered by CIC 2.4 will enable brandhouse and ATIO to achieve their business goals.

According to Pasman the need for system stability was a prerequisite for brandhouse so as not to lose "man days" due to system failure. The scalable IP telephony based system optimises workflow and business processes, giving brandhouse the ability to staff accordingly for peaks and troughs in call volume as well as utilise intelligence to provide an equal distribution of work amongst the agents. Masinga says, "Total cost of ownership is under control too; as the business grows CIC will take us into the future at minimal costs - the system will grow with it."

Transparency into reporting, multi-media queuing, reliable data outputs and the ability to leverage the system as a sales tool are other benefits. The speed at which activities can be executed has made a tremendous difference to both agent and back-office productivity. Wayne Carolus, an agent in the contact centre says, "We work in a time-limited environment. Now we can view information on hand and the new system allows us to do things faster. The outbound dialler is fantastic because we don't have to work with spreadsheets anymore. We care about our service levels and now we can see our real-time statistics on our pc screens."