Sky City is New Zealand’s largest multi-faceted entertainment and leisure destination, comprising a 344 room hotel, five restaurants, six bars, a state of the art theatre, fully equipped conference centre and a 328 metre Sky Tower. There is no other attraction in the country that matches the quality and quantity of services on offer at Sky City where there’s always plenty happening, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Gary Walker and his team needed a technologically advanced call centre system.  They selected HEAT as their product of choice and Olympic Software as the preferred supplier. HEAT is now providing support from a single database and server for all three existing Sky City owned sites and is to be installed at Sky Riverside - opening in Hamilton early next year.

Time zone differences within the multi-sited company provided challenges to be overcome. With Adelaide in South Australia 2.5 hours behind New Zealand, Adelaide HEAT users had to able to view their calls in the local Adelaide time, not New Zealand time as captured on the single database and server. To achieve this, Olympic worked with Sky City to give the Adelaide users access to the iHEAT module via a web browser and with the use of customised Auto Tasks and additional fields, it is ensured that the server time is recorded at system level. Standard HEAT useage would have meant calls logged by staff in Adelaide would be recording South Australian time at system level and if a call was logged on their behalf by an Auckland user, it would record New Zealand time only.

Another key multi-site requirement was limiting each site to view their own individual set of calls and associated call processes, while at the same time providing full views/functionality for all sites to the appropriate staff (eg management and 2nd level support staff. 1st level support is provided at local level for each site).

The provision to display site specific call types was also identified as an important feature for Sky City’s entertainment properties. For example, Sky City’s three complexes could have a total in excess of 200 + servers, perhaps only a small percentage of which exist in Adelaide. The call logging process was enhanced to ensure calls logged against the Adelaide site for say “servers” presented the HEAT user with a list of servers resident in Adelaide only and not the total list for the whole of Sky City. (NB – all Sky City property servers are of the same equipment type but are identified by unique ‘known as’ names).  This revised call logging process provides both quicker and more accurate call logging; with call history specific to each actual server.

The decision to stay with a single database also provided an additional business benefit in that each “site” is able to make use of the knowledge base module provided with HEAT rather than each having to create their own.

“You would be amazed at how easy it was to change our original database design to accommodate our new multi-site requirements,” says Gary Walker.

“We asked each team in turn what they wanted and tried to incorporate it into our system. HEAT is so flexible and easy to customise that we didn’t have to say no to anyone.”