Like many organisations over the last couple of years, Professional Services brands have experienced a massive shift into a new mode of work. The Pandemic generated significant challenges for almost all companies, introducing a new demand for work-from-home and hybrid strategies.
While the opportunity for digital transformation was phenomenal, many companies struggled with the transition, forced to replace legacy tools quickly.
Advanced Call Center Technologies (ACT) during the pandemic, became a critical hub for fielding calls and interactions with various clients. When volumes accelerated from 2,000 to 40,000 calls per day, the brand recognised a new demand for flexible technology to quickly respond to clients’ needs. The team decided to work with Avaya to implement a transformational OneCloud subscription. Here’s what happened when ACT and Avaya worked together.
Enhancing Experiences for Employees and Customers
ACT has been providing powerful outsourcing programs for customer support, fraud claims processing, and dispute management across a number of industries since 1997. Supporting teams across telecoms, retail, and financial services, the company operates across 17 locations, with nearshore and domestic US operations centres.
Even before the pandemic hit, the company had begun exploring how to enhance the experience offered for customers, system users, and employees alike. They also began looking for new opportunities to create efficiencies across service consumption platforms to assist with anticipated growth. The brand decided to work with Avaya as a trusted partner to conduct a comprehensive “Total Experience” review.
According to Hunter Croft, the CEO and President of ACT, discussions moved rapidly from hardware to software for various service delivery models. The advent of the pandemic, along with a massive increase in traffic, accelerated the demand for a flexible solution within the ACT ecosystem. The company decided it needed a way to help managers and executives collaborate and communicate with clients in real-time.
After reviewing all options, ACT chose a OneCloud subscription with Avaya, including Avaya Spaces, to help transform business operations cost-effectively and efficiently. Now, the brand is saving up to 1 million dollars annually on collaborative tools and boosting employee efficiency on a massive scale.
Avaya’s flexible subscription model even allows the company to add new licenses to its base without making capital purchases, aligning business models and cash flow while allowing ACT to transform its ecosystem flexibly at any point.
Reducing Costs and Improving Collaboration
While exceptional growth is a fantastic thing for any company, it comes with several challenges. Before switching to Avaya, ACT found the growing use of previous Workstream Collaboration tools was leading to high costs. Expenses increased by around $100,000 per month for various audio and video bridges, particularly as 94% of employees began working from home.
One of the most attractive parts of the Avaya OneCloud implementation for ACT was access to Avaya Spaces for collaboration. The Spaces environment allowed Experience Builders to support the needs of multiple stakeholders from a single application.
Spaces quickly became a replacement for many other meeting and video solutions, consolidating teams and reducing costs. Standardising the workforce on a new platform took less than two months for the company. The transition was simple and streamlined, and the adoption rate doubled in a short time. Now, thousands of active users collaborate in the Spaces landscape.
All the while, Avaya worked closely with ACT to review analytics and usage, ensuring the best possible conditions for a company committed to delivering powerful experiences to companies. With Avaya Spaces, ACT quickly celebrated 2.8 million call minutes in a single month.
With more than 11,000 agents distributed across 17+ contact centres, ACT also needed to maintain the knowledge and skillsets of staff in every environment. Spaces became an ecosystem for offering agent training for team members. The ability to record sessions also meant the training could become repeatable simply by sharing stored recordings with various teams.
According to Croft, the workforce can quickly set up a Space for collaboration where documents can be stored and ideas can be shared. This provides the team a valuable place where everyone can meet and keep track of initiatives.
During more open meetings, ACT even takes full advantage of the “Raise Hand” features in Spaces, ensuring people in large sessions can add to the conversation and ask questions without interruption for another speaker.
Maintaining Exceptional Service Levels
As a mixture of teams in the ACT environment began to return to the traditional office environment, new challenges emerged. Open-plan workplaces needed to be considered in more innovative ways. Avaya Spaces assisted with this transition too. The solution supports native AI-powered noise cancellation in the cloud, allowing employees to maintain clear communications on any device, wherever they are.
Agent teams began using Spaces with each other, management, and supervisors. Agents attending a call from a busy contact centre were pleased with the benefits of the noise reduction feature.
The Avaya ecosystem also paved the way for better client service for ACT. Built around the Media Processing Core, Avaya OneCloud seamlessly links all four elements of the business interaction space, from UCaaS to Contact Centre as a Service, Workstream Collaboration, and CPaaS.
The highly composable platform ensured ACT could create applications in real-time to solve various client challenges and deliver phenomenal speed to value. Using the CPaaS space, for instance, ACT can offer exceptional new client value. According to Croft, the team can drive better communications through their tools and higher velocity. CPaaS helps the team connect the various components of the network into a unified approach for business growth.
Using the Avaya Media Processing Core means ACT can facilitate powerful and seamless interactions between tech solutions. ACT’s partnership with Avaya allowed the company to meet the challenges of rapid expansion and business disruptions during the pandemic.
At the same time, by working with Avaya, ACT was able to prepare for future growth and expansion. Avaya’s exceptional customer service and support have made the company a phenomenal partner for the Professional Services brand.
