NSC keeps the Opera's voice in tune

Opera Australia is Australia's national opera company and is the busiest performing arts company in the country. It employs about 400 Australians and presents more than 200 main stage performances each year for the enjoyment of 260,000 opera devotees.

In order to better manage telephone enquiries and bookings, Opera Australia last December went searching for a voice communications system to replace its ageing PABX system at its Sydney and Melbourne offices.

The non-profit organisation relies on ticket sales, which are generated through various avenues - directly to subscribers and the general public, through the Sydney Opera House Box Office and agents.

Grant Cresswell, IT manager at Opera Australia, says requests associated with VIPs and sponsorships are managed internally via mail, fax, internet, brochures and counter sales.

In addition, the majority of enquiries are handled through the telephone sales group, which services approximately 600 to 700 calls per day during the peak subscription period between July and September.

Cresswell says the performing company had an ageing PABX system, an Ericsson BP250, which was more than 10 years old. "Some of the equipment was eight years old and some parts were 12 years old. We also refurbished parts of the system four years ago," he says.

Opera Australia has two call centres - one in Sydney and another in Melbourne. According to Cresswell, during an average year the Sydney call centre operates for six to eight months, and three or four months out of the year in Melbourne.

"Under normal conditions during the subscription period, calls to the centre double for around 12 weeks. We found the phone system becoming more and more unreliable and because of the age it was breaking down," Cresswell says.

"The centre had to deal with dropouts and it was no longer delivering management reports to help us collate data about traffic flows. We knew at some stage we had to do something about the unstable technology."

On top of having an old system late last year, Opera Australia also implemented a new CRM system for ticketing. The implementation was in partnership with the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Chamber Orchestra and the Brandenburg Orchestra, to help the performing companies standardise their customer relationship system to avoid duplication within their databases.

"Opera Australia, along with its consortium of partners, recently implemented an integrated customer information system across its entire organisation from box office through to back office," says Cresswell.

"The software, supplied by Tessitura Arts Enterprise, provides a suite of ticketing, marketing, development and fundraising tools," Creswell adds.

These two factors, according to Cresswell, helped the board take in recommendations from the IT group and move into a new system. They settled on a VoIP system, because the IR department found the cost to be around the same as a data system.

"We took a tender out to market in March and we had a short list of Cisco through a 3D partnership, Nortel through Optus and two Avaya Systems - one was the open office based on the UK version and the other was the enterprise system - which was based on a US design," he says.

According to Cresswell, NSC's offer to implement Avaya's enterprise system based on the US design was chosen because it was more of a VoIP system then the other digital products on offer. "The Avaya products have additional call centre software, which integrates with the rest of the Avaya system. This allows our two call centres - one in Sydney and Melbourne - to keep taking calls without disruption," he says.

Craig Neil, managing director, NSC says the integrator planned to implement an IP Telephony solution, comprising of Avaya Communication Manager 3.1 running on an S8300 media server with G700 gateways along with around 150 IP phones," he says.

"In designing the solution, we used Avaya technology to create a virtual environment for Opera Australia, a move away from the inter PBX/LAN/WAN networking currently in place," he says.

"This single communications client/server solution allows Opera Australia to deliver communications services cost-effectively to all users throughout the organisation. Data centre and disaster recovery benefits are provided via the centralisation of applications and servers for voice."

The Avaya solution delivers a converged environment for voice, unified messaging and call centre over an IP network, managed via an integrated suite of applications to meet the current and future needs of Opera Australia, claims Neil.

Cresswell says replacing the existing technology was no small task. The longest part of the project was data collecting and planning for the implementation, which took around eight weeks to complete. "Our Sydney office is located in Surry Hills and is an older building that has three or four generations of wiring. During the planning phase we discovered handsets and phone lines we didn't even know we had," he says.

According to Neil there were so many incoming lines they could easily divert calls to the wrong handsets. "During the planning phase we had to rationalise the job and figure out what lines were for calls coming in and which lines had not been used for a while."

Once that was complete, NSC had six weeks to go in and implement the system for Opera Australia. "The design and consultation phase was completed between both our teams. Then we had a very tight time frame for the start and finish of the implementation of the Avaya systems," says Neil.

"With the fairly short time frame for a call centre that size, having the backing of Opera Australia helped the project turn them around very quickly."

According to Cresswell, Opera Australia has been located in what use to be a hardware merchant building for around 15 years.

"We almost take up a whole street block. Our bottom floor makes the props and set stage to fit into the sets at the Opera House. Our middle floor is administration with around 130 staff. We also have four rehearsal studios. One of those is specifically for the orchestra and actors to perform dress rehearsals. Another area is for the painting of the sets," he says.
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Our call centre sits downstairs on the same floor as where the workshops are located ... We had our network infrastructure redone 10 months earlier. We implemented a state-of-the-art, network infrastructure with IBM server, Windows 2003 operating environment and Microsoft Terminal server thin clients."

For Opera Australia, a thin client was important because it has operations in two different locations. Cresswell says for part of the year the whole company packs up to put on performances in Melbourne. Having the same desktop in Melbourne gives staff the ability to operate in both locations without having to reconfigure desktops and systems.

"That's what the Avaya system allows us to do - just pack up to Melbourne without any problems. Otherwise Melbourne couldn't cope with the great influx of people coming down from Sydney," he says.