The Virtues of Virtual:
Major Wireless Telco Virtualizes Its Customer Care

Read how CosmoCom helped a leading North American wireless telco (we’ll just refer to them as “Cellco” in this story) replace four legacy call center platforms -- one was their own, the other three were owned and operated by outsourcers, one of which was offshore -- with a single virtual solution that spanned all four sites.   

The Challenge

Cellco’s customer service operation served a large and growing customer base with about 700 agents across four locations. Each location operated as an independent contact center. The main location was staffed with Cellco’s own employees. The other three locations were run by outsourcers, one of which was located offshore in a country with lower agent labor costs.

Each of these four contact centers housed and managed its own ACD with its own queuing patterns, routing rules, administrative tools and reporting capabilities. Therefore, any change to queuing or routing rules required four separate adjustments to four different systems by four different people who might well be operating in four different conceptual paradigms. This alone made the environment inefficient and prone to mistakes. In addition, with four separate systems, the cost of obtaining reports on the state of the entire operation was prohibitive. Furthermore, the telco had no way to monitor its outsourcers’ operations, indeed no visibility at all beyond a few periodic summary reports.

Adding to these operational inefficiencies was the fragmented way in which Cellco was handling different contact types. They were using three channels to communicate with its customers: telephone, email and fax, with each channel handled and tracked as a separate set of contacts. For example, emails came into a single mailbox shared by all agents. Fax was a completely paper-based process, time consuming and error prone. Cellco wanted to add web chat to the mix of customer contact options in the near future but was reluctant to fragment the situation even more.

In addition to a Nortel ACD, the main location housed two CRM systems: a Siebel system and a proprietary CRM developed internally. In order to enhance customer service, Cellco wanted to integrate the CRMs with the call center systems, providing a screen pop of customer data based upon information derived from both the incoming call and the IVR. They began integration efforts within the main location, and after more than six months of work, screen pops were still not working consistently.

Cellco wanted a contact center solution that would streamline its customer care organization into a unified, coherent virtual contact center that operated through a single back-office integration, used the same business processes across all locations, and enabled monitoring and management of any agent in any location at any time. They also wished to channel all customer contacts, regardless of type, into a single queue, automate the email and fax contact methods, and enable web chat as a part of the new, unified paradigm. They wanted to reduce agent talk-time by providing screen pop integration with third-party applications, including those that were proprietary such as their home-grown CRM.

Perhaps most importantly, they needed a solution that would allow them to reduce staff, enhance customer satisfaction, better manage its outsourcing operations and enable the company to easily switch to a different outsourcer, if necessary.

The Solution

After careful evaluation of a number of contact center solutions, including those of its incumbent vendors, Cellco chose CosmoCom’s CosmoCall Universe. CosmoCall Universe is a unified contact center suite that includes multi-channel ACD, IVR, CTI, predictive dialing, multimedia recording and administrative tools. Since the platform is all IP, it liberates call centers from their traditional physical constraints.

The Results

Cellco created a virtual call center with multiple physical locations, all managed and operated as a single entity. The four physical call centers, including the outsourced operations, now serve one set of queues and use the same business rules. CosmoCom’s administrative functions allow Cellco’s staff to configure and manage the virtual contact center, including any changes to personnel, skills, queues and groups. The secure, easy-to-use interface allows for on-the-fly modifications of queuing and routing parameters, which are propagated immediately to all locations. CosmoCall Administrator also provides the customer with constant visibility into its outsourcing operations, the flexibility of sharing administrative functions with their outsourcing partners, and the ability to access real-time and historical reports that reflect activity across all locations. And all of these features are available whether the outsourced call centers are located in the same city, or on the other side of the world. All of this makes it very easy for the customer to change outsourcers, if desired -- any new outsourcer need only provide agents with PC browsers pointed at the Cellco’s CosmoCall Universe system.

CosmoCom’s comprehensive multi-channel capability met Cellco’s requirement of handling all customer contacts, regardless of type, through one system. The platform not only supported their existing contact channels, but it also enabled web chat, and tracks and manages all customer contacts in one system with universal queuing. Cellco was also able to streamline email contacts and automate the originally paper-based fax process. Now, emails are distributed directly to the agent desktop, rather than to a single, shared mailbox, creating greater efficiency and reducing response time. Faxes arrive in electronic form, allowing agents to respond from their desktop rather than a physical fax machine and providing for convenient electronic storage rather than time and space-consuming paper archiving.

A major requirement of the contact center solution was the ability to integrate with Cellco’s Siebel CRM and their proprietary CRM. Their new solution greatly simplified this traditionally costly and time-consuming process, for two reasons. First, much of the functionality that is typically done as custom integration in a premise-based call center environment is built into the CosmoCall Universe platform. Second, CosmoCom provides CosmoConnector, an out-of-the-box integration enabler for connecting the platform with leading CRM applications, including Siebel and others. It also facilitates integration with new or unique CRM applications such as the customer’s home-grown one. Cellco was able to complete a proof-of-concept integration of the CosmoCom platform with both the Siebel and proprietary CRMs in less than two hours and full integration in two days, creating a screen pop based upon information collected from both the incoming call and the IVR. This is a remarkable feat, considering the turnaround time of a traditional CTI project and the six months spent by the customer’s IT staff on their unsuccessful attempt to integrate its Nortel ACD with its Siebel CRM.

Summary

The CosmoCom platform allowed Cellco to transform its multiple operations into a virtual call center with unified queues, routing rules, administration and reporting. It also provided the customer with direct visibility into its outsourcing operations and will facilitate any switches to new outsourcing firms. The platform enabled them to support every contact channel, including web chat, in a unified way and to streamline its process for handling email and fax customer contacts. Using CosmoConnector, they were able to easily integrate both of their CRM systems with CosmoCall Universe and deliver an informative screen pop to the agent’s desktop.

Indeed, they were able to reduce staff, decrease call duration and enhance customer satisfaction. And because they now are in a position to change outsourcers should they so desire, the performance of their existing outsourcers actually improved – so, at least for now, they haven’t had to!