Major UK Banking Group

Profile

Industry: Financial services, banking Employees: 71,200 Revenue: £13.13billion

Background: Major UK banking group covering several brands

Challenge; Providing extended support to Aspect dialer after vendor declared the technology end-of-life

Solution: Third-party contact center technology support

Benefit:

• Support 24x7x365
• Extended the life of technology to maximize investment
• Supporting the technology to enable business-as-usual

Background

This group provides a wide range of products and services to personal, commercial, and large corporate and institutional customers through a number of well-known banking brands.

Challenge

The bank was operating an Aspect dialer which the vendor had declared end-of-life. This posed a considerable dilemma for the bank because the technology was still working perfectly, and they were keen to maximize their investment and take control.

The business was operating a distributed Aspect dialer estate, which was deemed to be end of life by Aspect. The dialers were still operating effectively and reliably with very few issues and faults, yet the cost of annual support was rising considerably. The provider was putting pressure on the bank to change the dialer estate at a significant cost but without significant benefit over and above their current requirements.

The current vendor was reluctant to support the system any longer and relationships were becoming difficult.

Typically, in these cases, the incumbent provider also loses the ambition to provide a consistent and responsive level of support, and the bank had already seen early signs of this.

The bank's business units rely on a number of automated dialer systems to generate large revenues and maintain contact center efficiency on a daily basis, seven days a week. They were therefore looking for an immediate and cost-effective solution to support these systems.

Eckoh had been successfully supporting the bank's Nortel MPS legacy IVR platform for some time. The bank appreciated the differentiators of Eckoh support: 24/7 availability, a philosophy of helping the client rather than watching the clock, and a willingness to keep working until issues are resolved.

The bank naturally approached Eckoh as a trusted supplier to request support for the Aspect dialer estate. Eckoh's vendor independence and focus on serving real customer needs - rather than on 'forced march' upgrades and new license sales - made Eckoh a good choice to cope with this new challenge.

Solution

With its dedicated Aspect team, Eckoh agreed to provide 24/7/365 support for:

• Five distributed Aspect dialer systems handling over 500 simultaneous calls
• ECM (Enterprise Campaign Manager) systems covering 6 sites across the UK

This included hardware and software support, as well as a business-level understanding of the bank's operations.

In supporting the IVR, Eckoh had gained a strong understanding of the bank's processes and were therefore able to efficiently extend support operations to encompass dialer support. The entire pre-work of carrying out the requirements analysis, performing due diligence, putting a proposal together, and taking on the support was completed within two months, which was a major benefit for the client.

What next?

After two years of continuous Eckoh support for the Aspect dialers, and continuing support for their IVRs, the bank approached Eckoh with a new challenge. Their Aspect ACD estate had now been declared end of life by Aspect, who were reluctant to provide reasonable support terms going forward. These ACDs were critical to the bank's card payments business, and a solution was required quickly.

With its existing expertise in Aspect ACD support, already managing several Aspect estates for major enterprise customers in finance and communications, Eckoh was able to agree superior support terms very quickly. Within six weeks of the initial inquiry, Eckoh had agreed terms, taken on additional resources, and started support of the bank's Aspect ACDs across four sites in the UK. We are already engaged in additional project work to handle carrier changes that affect the ACDs - business as usual for Eckoh's flexible support team.

Value

• Maximizing investment in contact center technology
• Supporting the bank's key processes to ensure business as usual
• Speedy project delivery for minimal business disruption
• Eckoh's track record and exceptional reliability mean every case is treated with level 1 priority
• Expertise and skill, rarely available elsewhere, is available on a first call response basis. Eckoh's engineers guarantee a 4-hour on-site presence when needed
• Support is global and 24x7x365

Eckoh's reputation means that in 10 years, no one that has switched to Eckoh for support has ever returned to their original support provider.

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, please contact one of our trusted advisors.