Case studies are always a good way of letting people know how a technology is being implemented, and the benefits it provides to the users. I recently spoke with Aspect about one of its customers, a large telecom company that has implemented unified communications.
Aspect’s customer (which prefers to be unnamed) is a global IP solutions provider that offers data, voice and video products to Fortune 500 companies, as well as to 700 carriers, mobile operators and ISPs. With two main contact centers, the company found that its contact center hardware was reaching end of life, and the network had limited capability making it difficult to route calls between contact centers. The company wanted to improve its contact center operations in several ways, but was limited by its existing systems and applications. For example, it wanted to improve business efficiencies, lower training costs and meeting expenses, as well as reduce overlapping communications costs across multiple sites. The company also wanted to improve first call resolution by identifying the availability of content experts, but (like most) lacked the necessary processes to do so. In order to improve its operations and processes, the company needed features like presence. Without presence and UC capabilities, employees didn’t know the best way to reach colleagues (ask an expert) when trying to fix a problem, or even who to call. In addition, they were missing key features like real-time reporting and single user interface for voice portal and routing.
To meet its goals and successfully deliver streamlined communications and business processes, the company required a unified contact center solution, and chose capabilities from Aspect Unified IP, described as “an IT-ready Microsoft .Net Web services platform product that brings together customer contact capabilities to help organizations execute on their unified communications (UC) strategies.” Aspect Unified IP 6.6 capabilities were deployed across the company’s contact center operations to help improve customer communication and satisfaction.
One of the reasons Aspect Unified IP was selected was Aspect’s relationship with Microsoft and the two companies’ shared vision of how UC and the contact center fit together. The company currently has seven federated Microsoft OCS UC solutions in place allowing them to talk directly to vendors/partners via IM, with more expected down the road. According to Aspect, the telecom company “installed two Aspect Unified IP systems, offering advanced call routing capabilities to transfer callers to agents based on their skill sets and customer data gathered by back-end applications. The tight integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 allows agents to identify the availability/presence of experts throughout the enterprise to solve specific customer inquiries, helping improve first call resolution and enhance customer satisfaction.” Using Aspect’s call blending capabilities, the agents can respond to incoming calls and customer questions while also using the outbound capabilities to increase sales.
The company met all of its goals as a result of the Aspect implementation, and found a variety of additional benefits, including reducing long distance services costs by 30 percent, and decreasing the costs of using third-party collaboration services. The use of third-party collaboration services is currently down to 37 percent, and is expected to be down to zero in the next few months.
Aspect notes that the telecom company saved about $16,000 to $25,000 per week based on being able to leverage conferencing through OCS, and travel costs plummeted by 40 percent. Additionally, the company reduced IT support costs and security risks from IM tools. And, of course, there were soft benefits, such as increased user satisfaction.
Anyone who’s read my blogs knows that I’m a big advocate of expert agent-type capabilities for increasing first contact resolution. Even though I’ve been a proponent of this for a long time, it’s only been recently that we’ve had the technology to make this more practical. With UC and contact center solutions working together, companies can now utilize experts throughout the enterprise to more swiftly and accurately address customer inquiries, leading to reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction.