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Travel group calls on siptel to revise contact centre strategy
An innovative and highly successful international leisure travel group, operating in more than 50 countries and employing 80,000 people globally, required a virtual contact centre strategy.
Historically, the leisure group’s strategy had been to handle all its sales calls via separate call centres. However, it found that using retail sales agents to handle calls increased closure ratios, and thus profitability, exponentially. A virtual contact centre strategy was created that enabled the delivery of calls across the geographically dispersed contact centres and retail estate. The virtual contact centre meant that agents in physically different locations could function as if within a single contact centre, with incoming customer calls being delivered based on the skills of the agents. This then allowed the business to rationalise staff and office facilities, ultimately improving business overheads.
To add further capacity and flexibility, advisors based in the shops are now included in the virtual contact centre. siptel implemented a convergence solution, to help deploy calls more effectively throughout the business, implementing the virtual call centre using the remote extension capabilities of the Avaya Communications Manager. The peaks in call traffic were Monday mornings, lunch times and after school/work. At these times, shop agents were less busy with customers visiting the shops and were able to focus on sales calls. Their much improved rate of converting sales calls into bookings helped increase productivity.
siptel was chosen for its call centre experience, to consult on and implement the changes within the current network structure, as well as to deploy a sophisticated new communications system. siptel listened carefully to the travel company’s issues and proposed the implementation of the Avaya Communications Manager, IP soft phone and connectivity to a Genesys suite of call centre products, providing call follow control and call centre statistics and monitoring. This converged solution provided network-based call control, delivering the call centre agents’ functionality to the shop workers too. To ensure traditional voice quality, siptel also implemented real-time VoIP monitoring.
There were two main sites involved, supporting 3,000 users, as well as 500 shops. Phase One of the project was to implement telephony call infrastructure and Phase Two was the Voice over IP implementation. siptel designed the network to have 5 9’s reliability in the core system, as well as a network-based redundancy solution called Enterprise Survivable Server (ESS). siptel used its technical expertise to manage the existing network suppliers, ensuring that both the local and wide area networks were optimised to support telephony and creating a robust converged infrastructure.
An additional element, not previously considered by the business, but factored in by siptel was enhanced mobility, using Avaya’s ‘one-X Mobile’. This transforms a user's mobile phone into their office desk phone, and it has proved to be a reliable and useful tool, giving a single point of contact for users.
The solution was first tested on 10 users, to benchmark how successful the call handling would be, allowing shop workers to take the sales calls at peak times and leaving the call centre agents to deal with any overflow. Following the initial success, they increased the test criteria to 50 users, then 200 users and it has now been rolled out to over 1,000 users.
siptel project managed the whole implementation and supported it from start to finish, keeping the travel group informed of the project status at every step. The business has its own in-house training department but siptel trained their trainers on the new communication system.
The travel group‘s spokesperson commented, “siptel’s converged solution exceeded our expectations. Not only did it address our resource issues, but its functionality and sheer technical sophistication integrated seamlessly with the complex networking that was already in place. We initiated this project because of the need to improve productivity and increase resourcing efficiencies and we wanted to ensure all agents were fully utilised to their maximum potential. siptel’s solution has meant that we now have a flexible IT infrastructure in place that will allow the business to diversify or expand as the market place dictates.”
siptel is currently working on other projects across the travel group.
