ePLDT Creates Philippines’ First Contact Center On-Demand Service with CosmoCall Universe

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ePLDT is the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) subsidiary of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT). With two million fixed line and 47 million mobile subscribers, PLDT is the largest telco in the Philippines. ePLDT provides ICT solutions and IT infrastructure for Internet applications, IP-based services and multi-media content delivery to customers throughout Asia. Before introducing CCOD, ePLDT had maintained a large and growing outsourcing business for several years, including Ventus, a 6,500 agent multi-location call center serving the North American market, and SPi Technologies, Inc., a business process outsourcing operation with 5,000 agents in Asia and the U.S.

Using CosmoCall Universe, ePLDT created Unified Contact Center Plus™, the first Contact Center On-Demand (CCOD) business in the Philippines. Its services range from pure technology hosting to full service contact center operations and staffing.

CCOD: a New Service Generating More Value from Existing Infrastructure

ePLDT’s mission was to create ICT services to generate revenue and to add value to its parent’s increasingly commoditized carrier services. CCOD looked like an ideal candidate. The demand for CCOD was growing, fueled by local companies, government agencies, and Global 2000 enterprises, including U.S. companies with offshore call center operations. Many large U.S. corporations were potential CCOD customers because they had captive call centers located in the Philippines. The CCOD model also appealed to companies who could not afford to install, manage, and support a premise-based system.

ePLDT had everything needed to support a hosted CCOD business. It had Vitro IDC, a large, sophisticated, ISO 9001-2000 certified IT infrastructure. It had its own contact center experience as an outsourcer, and it could draw upon the experience of parent PLDT in serving its own large telephone customer base. It had everything, that is, but the right platform. That’s where CosmoCom, the most selected provider of such platforms globally, came into the story.

CosmoCall Universe Provides Foundation for CCOD Business

CosmoCall Universe is the foundation of ePLDT’s Unified Contact Center Plus offering. The business model lets customers of any size outsource the technology of a complete virtual contact center. Optionally, ePLDT will also provide the agents and all call center operations. Unified Contact Center Plus offers all the major functions of a contact center, such as ACD, IVR, CTI, recording, outbound predictive dialing, and administration, as well as tools for back-end IT integration and service creation. The unified architecture of CosmoCall Universe supports all communication channels: voice, email, SMS, web-chat, web collaboration, fax and even video.

Serving multiple tenants on one shared platform allows ePLDT to spread its operating costs among all its customers and utilize its IT staff more efficiently. The Multi-Tenancy capability of CosmoCall Universe makes it ideal for ePLDT’s business model, especially when it acts as a full service call center outsourcer. ePLDT uses cost-effective “universal agents” who can work in any tenant’s contact center after learning the CosmoCall Universe platform. These efficiencies drive down the cost per seat, so that ePLDT can offer competitive outsourcing prices profitably.

Because of the scalability of CosmoCall Universe, platform capacity is not a limiting factor for the size and broad range of services ePLDT can offer. Some of these services are short term, such as temporary incubation sites and back up systems for business continuity. At the other end of the spectrum are completely staffed call center operations with multimedia customer communications that are fully integrated with the customer’s business applications and IT infrastructure.

The integration tools and unified IP architecture of CosmoCall Universe support fast and inexpensive integrations with customer applications, giving ePLDT a major competitive advantage. After deployment, ePLDT customers use the tenant self-administration tools of CosmoCall Universe to supervise and manage their own operations. For example, they can add agents and define different types of agents, such as part-time and home-based.

Rapid Growth Across a Wide Range of Customers

ePLDT’s Unified Contact Center Plus has grown rapidly. It already hosts thousands of agents serving dozens of tenants. Customers include local private companies, Global 2000 enterprises such as Microsoft, and government agencies such as the Philippine Bureau of Internal Revenue. Small and medium businesses are now utilizing Unified Contact Center Plus to match the customer service provided by their largest competitors. Parent company PLDT is a major customer, using Unified Contact Center Plus for many of its core customer support operations. All these Unified Contact Center Plus customers are tenants on a single CosmoCall Universe platform.

Following the successful initial launch of Unified Contact Center Plus, ePLDT began a marketing campaign across the Philippines to educate enterprises on hosted CCOD as an alternative to traditional premise-based systems and outsourcers. The campaign includes a series of seminars targeting vertical industries in four groups: IT; banking and finance; government and hospitality; and manufacturing, retail and logistics. With its established and growing customer base, ePLDT is realizing its planned 30% annual growth for Unified Contact Center Plus.