Macif Assurances, France's leading provider of family insurance, including property, protection, savings, assistance and credit, has signed a major contract with Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories to improve its customer service capabilities.

Under the terms of the deal, NextiraOne, the insurer’s long-time systems integrator, is developing a next-generation contact center for Macif that will allow the company to use the entire range of integrated software in the Genesys 7 suite.

The Macif IT and telecommunications departments wanted to modernize the company’s call center infrastructure by generalizing computer telephony integration (CTI) technologies and giving supervisors the means to forecast calls. After evaluating several commercially available solutions, the company selected NextiraOne’s proposal to implement a full contact center, including the entire Genesys suite.

Before deploying the Genesys solution, Macif felt that its customer service provisions were falling behind those of other players in the banking and insurance sectors. The firm was not using any CTI tool, and calls were being routed site by site via a traditional automatic call distributor.

The rollout of this new contact center is a highly strategic move for us, guaranteeing us certain productivity gains, stated Dominique Baranger, director of the integration and architecture pole and project manager at Macif. With the new infrastructure, we’ll be able to provide improved service to our customers by better handling inbound and outbound traffic, as well as boosting the response time of our dedicated teams while controlling resources.

The implementation also represents a large regional win for Genesys. This implementation of the entire Genesys 7 suite is a major step in the development of our operations in the Niort mutual insurance sector, as we look to expand our outreach in the financial services and insurance industries in this region, commented Romain Lucas, account executive with Genesys France.

Macif Assurances currently employs a staff of 1,200 agents to manage some 10,000,000 inbound calls per year on its telephone platforms. The company plans to grow those numbers in 2007.