In 2006,
iPass, a vendor of enterprise mobile connectivity solutions, acquired another mobile connectivity company, GoRemote Internet Communications, and needed to integrate the two companies’ customer service centers.
At the time, iPass (News - Alert) ran its contact center through its in-house BIOS switch and ACD system. The company also used an outsourced contact center to handle a portion of its inbound contacts.
With the acquisition, the number of contact center agents grew from 12 to 70. The company considered bringing all these agents in house and expanding its infrastructure -- however it soon discovered that this would require a substantial investment in new hardware, installation/integration services, maintenance and software licenses.
So, company officials began searching for a virtual contact center solution that would allow iPass to handle customer service contacts through its four remote office locations in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Japan and India, as well as its outsourced contact center and its home-based agents worldwide.
“First of all, we were looking for a solution that would allow us to consolidate metrics. We wanted all our agents on one reporting system,” explained Jeanine Stephens, director of iPass IT. “We also wanted to be able to share best practices among supervisors of agent teams worldwide, and we knew that having one contact center solution with a common monitoring and recording system would facilitate that. We also needed flexibility, so we could add teams from outsourced vendors to our virtual contact center without being locked into their infrastructure.”
Stephens said the company also needed a solution with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that would allow it to handle inbound contacts with and without prompting for contact routing, since half of its contact center used prompting for contact routing and the other half did not.
After an extensive RFP process, the company ended up selecting Contactual’s OnDemand Contact Center solution for its virtualization capabilities. Today, the company is able to easily manage all of its agents worldwide – including its four remote sites, its outsourced facility and its network of home-based agents. With this powerful, full-featured contact center software, iPass not only has the ability to collect metrics on every agent at every site, it can also monitor and record agent interactions -- as well as archive them so they can be retrieved later for training purposes.
Contactual’s (News - Alert) OnDemand Contact Center solution also enabled iPass to easily integrate its CRM system, thus enabling contact center agents to quickly access detailed customer information on their screens and improve customer service (as well as to collect new customer information and update its CRM database in real time). In addition, Contactual’s Interactive Voice Response System (IVR) gave the company the flexibility to route a variety of inbound contact types accurately and efficiently.
“Overall, I think Contactual brings us a certain synergy and ultimately more productivity,” Stephens said, when discussing the benefits of migrating to Contactual’s contact center software. “It makes our customer operations feel as one, because of the visibility that supervisors have into all the agents’ activities. Supervisors are able to easily share reports and other information with each other and that creates more synergy between the groups. It used to be that things were done differently by our supervisors and agents in Australia, the UK, Japan, India and the U.S., but Contactual streamlines their processes and brings information together. That centralization and synergy makes all the groups more productive.”
“Contactual’s real-time monitoring gives us complete visibility into our contact center operations around the globe,” Stephens continued. “It gives us the metrics our supervisors need to manage their agent teams and ensure quality customer service. Monitoring agents in real time, our supervisors can see statistics on service levels vs. goals, the number of contacts waiting or in progress, and so on. They can see status graphs that show the percentage of time an agent spends on contacts, waiting, wrapping up a contact or on a work break. Contactual makes it so easy for our supervisors to see the agent groups -- who is active and who is not.”
To learn more about how iPass is benefitting from its adoption Contactual’s OnDemand Contact Center software, check out this customer case study from Contactual’s website.
Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Patrick Barnard