The extent to which smart operational strategy and shrewd technological investments can completely transform an organisation can be remarkable.
When Nigel Mansfield, Contact Centre Strategic Lead at Standard Focus, took over his new role at the Asia-based business process outsourcing (BPO) financial organisation, he was faced with turning a contact centre strategy “from what was basically a siloed operation to something with a unified platform that allows us to make multiple contacts in all the different media types that are possible”.
The change has been striking.
“We are a full omnichannel contact centre,” Mansfield told UC Today at this year’s Avaya ENGAGE. “We do absolutely everything through video, voice, voice-bots, chatbots, email, and chat. Everything. Voice is even on Web RTC. We barely use SIP anymore. We’re now quite an advanced contact centre.”
The Implementation Story
That wasn’t always the case, though. With Mansfield’s strategic leadership, Standard Focus manoeuvred itself out of a difficult period for its contact centre set-up.
“We were in real trouble,” Mansfield explained. “We were growing really fast as a business; the customer base was expanding very rapidly, and we were putting bums on seats. We had people just pulling emails out of Outlook; we had a SIP server, which was freeware. We had no idea how many calls were going on, we had no idea what they were about.”
“There was a lot of chat going on, but we had no idea what the volumes were or if the customers were suffering. We were just trying to put bodies in place, but the more bodies we had, the more contact we took.”
“We were in a real mess. We needed to stabilise, and we needed to go to a full omnichannel solution, which would allow us to bring the agents across multiple different media types and even out the flows of communications we were getting from the customers.”
Standard Focus went to market and eventually chose Avaya via an RFP process that lasted 18 months when the business was still growing.
“Avaya was the one who was able to do the omnichannel far better than anybody else, and their routing was far superior to anybody else from what we could see, so we went ahead and did the implementation,” Mansfield continued.
“We were actually the first company to do EWC (enterprise web chat) on the Avaya AACC platform. It was very successful, it was able to deal with high volumes of chat, which is our primary contact channel. 75 percent of our contacts are coming in through chat. That was very important for us to get that right, and it made a massive difference.”
The omnichannel implementation reduced Standard Focus’s operating costs by £18 million a year, which “kept the CFO happy for a bit!”
This gave Standard Focus’s contact centre arm a more flexible budget to carry on and experiment because Mansfield and the team had already proved what the technology could do.
Additionally, the team began developing its own AI programme about seven years ago, “so way before most people tried to do it,” Mansfield said. They played with the models to try to better understand what Standard Focus’s customers were actually talking to it about.
“It was one thing to finally find out how many of them there were; the next step was, ‘What are they saying to us? Why are they contacting us? What problems do they have?'” Mansfield clarified. “That then enabled us to really deal with the customers’ problems at source.”
What about the implementation process itself?
“The project for AACC took about a year to implement,” Mansfield explained. “The technologies we were on were so bad that we were able to take some risks because we knew we were haemorrhaging contacts at the time. We couldn’t really control the demands that we had, so we did just have to bite the bullet and get on with it.”
“There were some lessons we learned along the way, there were some bits that didn’t work as we wanted them to. We had some help with Avaya for chat and email implementation, but it was, by far, the better solution once we got it in.”
AACC enabled Standard Focus to control the journeys customers were taking and the flows they were presenting to the business, fully grasping how to meet the “tsunami of contacts” it was receiving at the time.
Always On The Lookout For Progress
Mansfield and Standard Focus haven’t rested on their laurels either. They are constantly on the lookout for new innovations. Their contact centre recently migrated to Avaya’s AXP platform off of AACC.
“Again, a little bit trailblazer-y,” Mansfield said. “We were probably the first to do it across all the channels. The way we’ve done it again, a similar experience in as much the implementation took nine, 12 months to get it all across. There’s still bits and pieces we’re still moving across even now because the AXP platform doesn’t have every media channel hosted within the solution yet, in particular around Web RTC.”
AXP was a more complex implementation, with the movement to the cloud. However, Mansfield and its team found it was much safer as movement to the cloud empowered them to bring agents on “gently” while still having the on-premises solution to fall back on if something went wrong.
AXP saw Standard Focus reap “significant benefits”, especially platform stability.
“If I’m honest, the AACC was starting to creak at the side. We had a number of tickets we were raising with the team to develop more bits and pieces,” Mansfield expanded. “AXP came along at the right time for us to move to a cloud-based platform, but more than anything else, our AI program needed that AXP because it’s an open architecture, it allows you to tap in using the APIs, while AACC doesn’t.”
“The AI we did at the start was all based on chat and we were basically reading the chats off the agent screen. We weren’t integrated into the back end of Avaya, and we are now. We can comfortably and easily read those conversations, it’s made our lives so much easier, accelerated that AI program much faster in AXP.”
The complexity provided by AXP can create its own unique challenges, however.
“A lot of the time, we’re facing challenges because we’re reaching points in the technology that nobody else has reached,” Mansfield said. “There are a number of bits and pieces that Avaya has had to go away and develop for us or kindly allow us access to APIs that no one else has allowed us to play with. We’re playing with that in production and at scale, so we’re sharing those lessons with Avaya.
“As a result, we’re moving that technology stack much more forward and quickly than we were able to on our own. We really did need their help, and they needed our help, to be fair.”
“We’ve been able to pull off some pretty cool AI in the background in terms of email, where we’re now reading email in the queue, not even waiting for it to reach an agent. We can work out what it’s about and work out which of those journeys can be automated. We can use OCR (optical character recognition) technologies to then pull those out of the queue, and where customers were previously waiting eight hours to have their email answered, it’s being done in eight seconds now.”
Mansfield stressed that it is always about solving problems. Standard Focus want to do a lot with the technology and it’s about working out what the right tech stack is to apply to the problem. Generative AI might appear like a universal problem solver, but Mansfield stressed the nuances of its possible introduction.
“With generative AI coming to the scene, it looks so easy, ‘Prompt engineer everything and off we go’, but it isn’t,” Mansfield clarified. “You get a lot of unexpected outcomes from employing that type of technology. Customers don’t always react in the ways you expect them to. They do unusual things in the face of implementing those technologies.”
“The other side of generative AI that isn’t really talked about that much is the cost. It’s actually a lot more cost than traditional machine learning AI. That’s an element where we have to justify the implementations we want to do because costs are not as low as they were in the previous models.”
Looking Ahead
Standard Focus also have some “really cool ideas coming through” over the next few months.
“The first one is what we call the ‘What you don’t know’ analysis,” Mansfield explained. “The AI is analysing the conversations and it is looking for the things you wouldn’t necessarily know to search for. With the work we’ve done so far, we have an idea of what the problem is, and we’re trying to fix that particular problem. Now we have the engine itself saying ‘I don’t think you realise this is happening’.”
However, Mansfield is even more compelled by the second development Standard Focus’s contact centre is working on; the AI-powere migration from customer segmentation towards clustering.
“We’re using AI to cluster customer attributes to find groups of customers rather than using traditional segments, which are human-driven decisions based on normal values, ‘These are going to go into these buckets, and we’re going to treat them like this’,” Mansfield said. “The AI has allowed us to find clusters of behaviours and attributes of customers, optimise the number of clusters and allow us to treat those customers based on those behaviours and attributes, which all derive from the AI itself.”
“This was a problem that would take a lot of humans a very large amount of time, and we’ve done that in a couple of months. The outcomes are now starting to come to the forefront, and we’ve started to see the value. It’s mindblowing what we can do with this stuff. We’re really excited about this one.”
