Green energy provider Pozitive Energy supplies bespoke environmentally-friendly energy packages to almost 115,000 business sites but was experiencing spiralling communications costs for its four contact centre sites. Two previous cloud telephony vendors had failed to address the company’s needs, which encompass two sites in the UK and two in India, with call costs totalling twice that they were originally quoted. In spite of this poor experience, Pozitive Energy remained convinced of the benefits of cloud communications and turned to NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT UCaaS desktop and mobile app, and the company’s UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE CCaaS solution for advanced users.
Twice bitten
“Having being bitten by our previous cloud communication vendors, we needed a cautious approach of installation, team by team,” explains Neeraj Bhatia, the CEO of Pozitive Group. “UNIVERGE BLUE was sufficiently agile to do this and was a natural fit for our business.”
NEC’s partner Greet Solutions was responsible for the complete project and swiftly won back Pozitive Energy’s confidence in cloud telephony. “Our tiered implementation with Greet Solutions went very smoothly with a low outage rate,” adds Bhatia. “They were very easy to work with and we experienced almost zero downtime and on-time support. We would strongly recommend them.”
Following deployment Pozitive Energy now has implemented CONNECT Essential users for UCaaS which provides more than 90 business telephony features, chat, text messaging, videoconferencing, screen sharing, file sharing, and file back up. In addition, Pozitive Energy has invested in ENGAGE Advanced user licences for its contact centre teams, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for employees and customers over multiple communication channels.
The experience so far has been a complete contrast to Pozitive Energy’s previous adoptions of cloud telephony. “It was easy to get started with 80% of our workforce not requiring any training whatsoever,” confirms Bhatia. “Our remote workers from different sites all use the same communication tools. We can IM, video collab and share files which makes the teams closer and more responsive.”
Single pane of glass
With often complex customer enquiries to handle, deploying a UC system that is simple to manage across multiple platforms and locations was an essential requirement that UNIVERGE BLUE was able to meet. “The integration of UCaaS and CCaaS creates a ‘single pane of glass’ experience for our teams,” adds Bhatia. “Our efficiency has increased by 90%.”
In addition, Pozitive Energy has been able to add to its communication capabilities. Inbound and outbound SMS services, which enjoy a 98% open rate for contact centres, were also a big part of the company’s plans. “We introduced SMS which wasn’t available from our previous vendor,” says Bhatia. “We can now communicate with our on-site engineers more quickly and efficiently with instant responses.”
The contrast with previous vendors has been like night and day. “The support wasn’t even near our requirements with no helpline to call, only email and a five-day response time – even when the system had gone down,” Bhatia recalls. “Plus, we were being charged twice the call costs we were expecting.”
Bhatia has kept the faith with cloud telephony because of its complex communication needs that often involve in-depth support provided around the clock by teams in both the UK and India. Pozitive Energy could see the benefits but struggled to find a vendor that could unlock them efficiently. With UNIVERGE BLUE it has been a case of third time lucky.
