Major US Telecoms

A leading US telecoms business provides 3 million customers with mobile, broadband, video and other communications services.

Profile

Industry: Telecommunications Employees: 254,000 Turnover: $192.43 billion

Business: A leading telecoms business providing mobile, broadband, video and other communications services to US-based consumers and more than 3 million companies.

Challenge: Making their internal desktop solution work with any telephony platform the business was using and be able to switch between the two without wasting agent time and keeping the customers waiting.

Solution: Eckoh delivered the Coral Agent Desktop solution which they have under an exclusive license. Eckoh and the business have a long-term relationship in contact center solutions so it was a natural choice.

Benefit: The vendor-agnostic solution meets the business needs in terms of working with any telephony platform and enabling agents to swap between systems.

Background

The company, a large US telecoms business, delivers advanced mobile services, next-generation TV, high-speed internet and smart solutions for people and businesses. They serve millions of business customers across all major industries, ranging from the largest global companies to medium and small businesses. They also serve multinational customers and do business on more than two continents and have significant networking requirements in the US.

The company's global IP network connects businesses on six continents and services more than 400 million people in North America.

Challenge

The previous desktop application was geared solely for their Genesys platform. With plans to build a new contact center, the company intended to rent out agent space to different business units to deal with all-handle contacts.

During the build, a Cisco system was added to the Genesys system in the contact center. This meant that whichever business unit was using the contact center, they could use their preferred system. However, this raised a further problem as the company's current internal desktop solution would only work with one of these systems, so agents were not able to switch between the two. Also, every time that the agent goes from one system to another, time is lost and inefficiencies rise.

Any contact center needs to manage the inevitable peaks and valleys. So, the company required a solution that would work regardless of the underlying infrastructure. They also wanted to be able to change infrastructure suppliers in the future if necessary.

Convincing senior management

"It wasn’t difficult to create the business plan for this and convincing senior management that it was a good idea was simple. We were able to show the benefits from a product, training and user perspective and highlight the advantage of being able to use either of our infrastructures.

"By showing that it would improve agent performance, efficiency and customer service the team was able to get internal business units to contribute to the financing. The company's business case focused on Coral's features and functionality as much as the agent's perspective. Being able to demonstrate the tremendous benefit of being able to switch the Genesys or Cisco systems for another one if necessary was a key point. They wanted to be able to do this without having to pay additional costs just to use the same application."

Associate Director

Future-proofing the investment

Part of the business benefit was to show that they could future-proof the desktop solution infrastructure as well as the ongoing maintenance. This was as important as maximizing the investment.

If the company needs or wants to make changes, they can do that far more easily with Coral than with their internal application. Previously they would have needed to make a physical code change and then re-deploy the entire application to 25,000 desktops.

As ongoing costs are minimal, and changes can be made within a couple of hours, rather than weeks, the company is more flexible and agile to respond to business and customer demands.

• Works with multiple systems or single IVR, CTI, or CRM systems
• Improves the agent capabilities and customer experience
• Refreshingly simple to implement and manage
• Future-proofs the desktop environment Minimal ongoing cost of training due to the solution's simplicity.

Agent reaction

From a training, and user, perspective the solution looks the same, so the desktop is the same regardless of the platform. This has led to faster adoption and a simpler implementation with less disruption to contact center performance.

Training

The company devised a training course for new and existing users which takes about one hour. This has now become a formal sponsored course that agents complete and is similar to a CBT course.

The training is easy to deliver remotely using a conference bridge which is how they delivered training to their primary contact center. Having trained trainers in each location, users are kept up to date and new agents are brought up to speed quickly.

Because of the way the application works, the company has been able to create dashboards that pull data together so that supervisors can troubleshoot easily. Before, the company would have had to contact individual supervisors in each location and explain the errors or problems.

Capability for one or many systems

The Coral solution works across multiple platforms as well as for one platform. This makes it ideal for organizations that have been through a few acquisitions because it allows you to bring different systems together so your agents remain efficient and effective and able to handle future changes or additions.

For example, as a result of an acquisition the company finished up with four different systems. Each one had the customers' account numbers or names in four different fields in the four different systems. In their old application that would have been a significant drawback but Coral handles this easily because of the way it acts as a "presentation layer," bringing those diverse systems together.

This is proof of the flexibility and efficiency built into Coral and the Orchestration manager. This enhancement would have taken 4 months with the other desktops we used before Coral.

Senior Systems Engineer

If you need to make changes — that's simple. You can even do it on the fly. Many of the other solutions we looked at had similar capabilities but they were geared to just one technology which is quite limited in many situations and certainly for us.

Associate Director

Everyone benefits

The great thing about this solution is that it appears to everyone - at different levels in the business. For IT groups, it offers something really simple to get up and running as well as maintain. For the contact center manager, it's a dream because they can create dashboards to let them see how agents are working and where the issues may be - spotting trends to predict potential peaks or valleys so they can maximize their agent resources to cope. Training is also made simple. It's now really easy to train new agents which helps improve the productivity of the contact center because it's intuitive and clear to understand.

Solution

The company had an incredibly short time frame in which to get this implemented. This problem was compounded by a break in communication between the business and the contact center. For example: The company had to get everything ready for the internal site launch in Missouri.

The team had known for some months that the implementation was due but not exactly when. So when advised that the Go Live date was on the coming Monday, there was an urgent need for experienced help — they contacted the Eckoh team to help them get ready. The teams spent a couple of hours on the phone together just walking through the configuration based on feedback from the business with Eckoh making changes on the fly.

In about a week, Eckoh had everything done and having tested the solution, the rollout went amazingly smoothly. Eckoh was even able to make small adjustments to add new requirements which weren't specified at the outset.

Value

• Agent training time dramatically reduced
• No bespoke integrations across multiple platforms
• Cost-effective and scalable

What about the future?

Looking five or ten years ahead is important for the company but it's also difficult to predict exactly what will happen in terms of evolving the business or acquisitions.

But, one thing the company does know is that the Coral solution has future-proofing built-in because it can work with any technology and so takes away the headache of integration.

The way that Coral is built on HTML 5 javascript and patent CSS means it's really easy to upgrade, update and reconfigure. Many new recruits today have coding, HTML or C++ developer skills which means there is a ready pool of talent that businesses can use to their advantage.

What's next?

After rolling-out the Missouri contact center - with a target of over 200 agents - this is expected to grow. This will bring the total number of agents licensed for Coral to 8,000. Towards the end of the year, the business plans to migrate another 2,000-agent contact center to the system with a further 2,000 planned for mid-2018.

Following these migrations, they plan to review their contact center operations with a view to moving more agents to the Coral system as appropriate.

The company really wants to get Coral implemented across their entire organization. But, as a large and diverse business, it takes some planning and resourcing.

They currently have a need for around 6,500 licenses and fully expect that this will grow as the momentum builds and drives demands from around the business.

Looking Forward

As a solution unique to Eckoh, we recognize that this example is likely a challenge many other enterprise organizations struggle with when they begin tackling payment security within their contact centers. Some organizations may even feel like their only option is to either deploy hardware on-premise – likely disrupting long-term cloud transformation strategies – or only achieve partial PCI DSS de-scoping.

As a result, the methodology innovated for The Client is now part of the Eckoh architecture. In fact, multiple other clients have also taken advantage of this solution, allowing them to maintain their existing telephony architecture while maintaining the strictest possible standard for payment security.

To learn more about how Eckoh secures payments across all engagement channels, reach out to one of our trusted advisors.