Affinity4 has announced that it completed a major upgrade of its Norfolk, Virginia call center encompassing new PCs, flat panel monitors, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), plasma screens and a customer relationship management (CRM) program.

 

With this latest upgrade, the company intendeds to assure its “high quality” customer service in response to steadily increasing call volume. Affinity4 is an affinity-based marketer specializing in helping charities, ministries and other non-profit organizations raise funds.

 

According to company officials, the upgrade project was prompted by the increasing number of calls coming into Affinity4's Call Center. This year in July, the company received its highest call center volumes ever.

 

During the upgrade process, all new Hewlett Packard (HP) PCs and flat panel monitors were installed along with a new Asterisk (News - Alert)-based VoIP phone system.

 

In addition, 52-inch plasma screen was also installed to communicate important information to agents. Officials said that to improve service quality, the off-site data center was changed with all new servers.

 

Also, as part of its Call Center upgrade, Affinity4 is in the process of implementing a SugarCRM (News - Alert) solution. This solution will replace previous proprietary and commercial packages the company had been using. Using SugarCRM, the company expects to aggregate management of all customers, products and potential customers into a single application.

 

Officials said this will result in enhancing Affinity4's reporting capabilities and its call center agents will be able to access more information about customers while on the phone with customers.

 

The initial phase of the SugarCRM application launch has been completed with the full-scale rollout expected to be complete by year's end.

 

“With these significant enhancements in technology and personnel, we will be able to exceed our customers' expectations when it comes to customer service, while still focusing on growing the business at a manageable rate,” said Michael Baldwin, senior call center manager at Affinity4.