Case study

An organisation had purchased an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system to replicate the functionality of their aging system and provide additional functionality. There were various issues resulting from the introduction of the new system, primarily that the queuing functionality did not work as the customer wanted it to.

Unfortunately the relationship between the customer and supplier had deteriorated; the customer reverted to the old system and took legal action against the supplier.

At this point we were called in to act as a “Single Joint Expert Witness”, reporting to the Judge to give Expert opinion.

The investigation involved determining what the customer had requested of the supplier and what had been supplied. The main problem was that neither the customer nor the supplier had produced a specification or statement of requirements, however the requirement for call queuing was accepted by both parties.

Technical investigation showed that the functionality for call queuing had not been fully enabled on the system; however other functionality that the customer thought they were getting was not available. It could not be proved that the customer had agreed with the supplier that this functionality would be provided.

The case was resolved with the customer getting limited damages from the supplier. The moral of the story is to ensure a statement of requirements or a specification is agreed and that if an independent party had been called in earlier to provide expert advice legal costs would have been avoided.

Unfortunately there are times when things have not gone right and you may be in dispute with your Supplier or Customer, either Internal or External.

It may be that a new telephone system does not have the functionality you thought you were getting or there are problems in the way it works, or does not work.

The end price may not reflect the amount you were expecting to pay, some items may have been charged as extras when you thought they were part of the overall cost.

Issues may arise with existing services/systems not working properly or Service level Agreements not being met.

Where ever possible these sorts of issues should be resolved amicably between yourselves and the other party.

If that does not work we have wide experience in resolving these sorts of issues.

If the issues cannot be resolved amicably the way to resolve such issues is to have an independent expert investigate the situation around the dispute and provided a clear and impartial report and recommendation as to how it can be resolved.

In extreme cases this situation can end up in the Courts where an Expert Witness will be required to provide the Judge with an expert’s opinion of the situation.
In either case we can provide suitably trained and experienced Consultants to provide these services.

We have helped our clients in this way, fortunately in most cases without having to resort to the time and expense of using the formal legal system. The way to ensure that this sort of issue does not arise is to ensure that all requirements are fully documented and specifications are produced, by doing this issues can either be avoided or very quickly resolved. We have vast experience in producing such documentation and where we have done this for our clients there have never been issues that could not be easily resolved.