Optimum Contact Solutions provide call centre services to many household names, including Littlewoods and Shop Direct. In July 2005, they were faced with a major challenge in their call centres - how to cost effectively train hundreds of new users and equip them to work on their call centre IT systems.

Optimum turned to Atlantic Link to develop a fully interactive simulation of their call centre IT systems, allowing staff to be trained at any time on a brand new training simulator. The initial system comprised over 4,500 screens of software simulation.

Atlantic Link was the only company bidding that could complete the project in less than 12 weeks. Because of their radical and unique production tools, they were confident that this challenging timescale could be met. Most competitors were looking at timescales 2 or 3 times longer, with costs to match.

The system has already proved itself, after just 4 weeks of live running.

The highlights include:

Courses are already being delivered in two thirds of the time taken prior to elearning.

Learners are going live in the call centres significantly earlier than previously.

The Learners are better prepared for the live environment, as the training replicates the actual screens and scenarios that they will be presented with.

The Optimum project manager commented:

"Atlantic Link are a great company to work with, they are adaptable and flexible and extremely patient with a very demanding project manager. We knew we were faced with a huge challenge to implement the solution in such an aggressive timeframe. Not only did we achieve this but we had fun along the way and developed a high quality training base. The real benefit for me was the software's superior functionality that enabled us to become self sufficient once the project closed down, together with the learning expertise that Atlantic Link were able to provide. We could not have achieved this without the partnership approach and the close working relationship that we developed."