Telecommunications Business

A simpler solution to unifying agent desktops to reduce admin and support costs while improving agent performance.

Profile

Industry: Telecommunications Employees: 36,000 Revenue: $27.1 billion

Business: A large Australian telecommunications business, operating since 1975. The business builds and operates telecoms networks and marketing voice, mobile, internet access and pay television.

Challenge: As a service provider the business did not want to have to train their 30,000 contact center agents on multiple different desktops and to obtain the flexibility to have different agent desktop look and feel.

Solution: Eckoh created an ultra-thin intelligent agent desktop using its exclusive license with Coral. The single agent desktop integrates with any, or multiple, CTI, ACD and CRM products.

Benefit:

• Easy to navigate between systems from one place with one login
• Flexibility to scale up, or down
• Speedy deployment.

Background

In the course of upgrading, the business wanted to take a step back from all of the CTI issues, firewalling and inter-operation issues associated with all of those agent desktop scenarios.

They didn't want to have the disparity of agent desktops, the problem of learning all the desktops and they wanted a more portable way of delivering that consistency.

Challenge

The business wanted the flexibility to deliver a variety of agent desktop designs without continuous deployment cycles. They wanted a product that provided them with the ability to instantly deliver a unique agent desktop environment depending on which 800 number a customer dialed.

There are a number of applications the client used for agent desktop tools. They didn't pick up a lot of client information and were simply fed information from a central repository. However, because contact centers and agents want to do so much more in terms of customer interaction at the agent desktop level, the thin clients became thicker and thicker. This evolution of the clients are now almost essentially full-blown desktop applications.

This evolution was driven largely because of the agent's increasingly sophisticated requirements for things like data dipping to systems like Siebel or SAP or bringing up multi-media content such as video. These sorts of activities are extremely difficult to do using the older web and browser technology.

The outcome...

• 80% reduction in admin and support costs
• 12-second saving on AHT
• 23-second saving on AHT offshore

Eckoh really helped us to take ownership of this solution. Initially, we relied on them to provide the professional services around getting it 'up and running.' But, I was keen for my team of 20 to really understand the solution and its capabilities so that we could proactively manage it going forward. My team observed Eckoh's implementation and welcomes the instructions provided. The rollout went extremely smoothly compared to what we had before.

Associate Director
Australian Telecoms company

Solution

Eckoh helped the enterprise by creating Coral Ultra-Thin Intelligent Agent Desktop

What did Eckoh do to help?

• The breakthrough was to introduce HTML 5 using web socket capability. This allows a persistent connection between the agent's browser and the server. Web sockets allow emulation of thick client technology. It provides an "always on" constant connection to the server which allows the server to push information to the user instead of constantly polling the server. This has opened the door to some tremendously creative things that can be done from a web browser perspective.

• HTML 5 is also a more blended browser technology, for example, it has multimedia awareness built in. In general, it is much less dependent on external software (plug-ins) to deliver content.

• The ability to have a persistent connection to the server and a much richer delivery mechanism in the browser opens up the door to do a lot of unique things. For example, the biggest issue with older web technology in delivering an agent pop, was time. If polling the server every 5 or 10 seconds and the phone rings, and it takes up to 4 seconds for the screen pop to appear on the screen, it's out of sync. With a persistent connection, there is an instant pop and the interaction is happening in synch on the agent desktop.

• The technology differentiator is that there is no software in Coral that runs on the desktop. There's no installation, no need to upgrade, no need for an IT department to do a deployment push, no concerns about what operating environment you're running, we can deliver the same look and feel on any device.

Benefits & value

• Agent training. Since video can now be pushed, when a new agent logs in for the first time, a step-by-step tutorial is brought up in order to show how to use the desktop. This becomes even more valuable when agents are remote or working with multiple desktops. The cost and time savings in training are very significant.

• As a service provider working for different customers, or a company with a range of products or services, Coral provides the ability to present a different desktop look and feel to the agent depending on which 800 number the customer dials. That translates directly to more efficient delivery of service and a better customer experience.

• When upgrading or doing a technology refresh, Coral provides a path for a much more flexible and efficient deployment of agent desktops. In a platform upgrade and Coral allows the department to completely leap-frog the older IT infrastructure and move to a complete browser-based agent desktop. That represents another huge win in terms of time and cost savings for almost any contact center contemplating an upgrade strategy.

• Coral provides the ability to deliver the same look and feel to a mobile device. For roaming personnel that are providing some level of support to customers, now have access to the same tools, the same techniques that an agent has, all right on their smartphone or tablet.

• This technology allows us to create highly customized interactions based on customer type. A credit card company could have a screen pop appear with the color associated with that member's card along with the associated fields for their level of benefits.

• Since we can push multi-media, if a company was running a radio advertising promotion, we could play that radio promotion when the agent logs in. So, the agent can be aware of exactly what callers are hearing in the ad and respond appropriately. We can increase the agent's awareness of the customer they have on the phone, the situation they are in, the company they are working with and the corporate messaging environment going on around them. All of this makes the agent more effective and more empowered.

Implementation

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.

So, 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 - what they wanted and so forth - with Eckoh making changes on the fly.

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

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.

They plan 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.

Value

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

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.