Unified Communications Transformation Improves Customer Experience

Enhanced communication and contact center capabilities provides new customer experience possibilities.

Digital transformation and financials

Companies from every industry are continuously increasing focus on providing top-notch customer experience, and financial institutions are no exception. Financial organizations across the globe are investing in infrastructure that offers instant, customized and secure IT services for their end customers.

For local banks, it can be difficult to keep up with the industry giants when approaching digital transformation. One US-based Regional Bank was struggling with their legacy communication and contact center tools. The acquisition-led growth of the Bank resulted in multiple decentralized and disparate systems managed by a single group. Their infrastructure was years past supportability deadlines, burdening internal IT staff with out-of-date hardware and endless service requests.

Falling behind the industry curve, they needed to adopt and migrate to a next-generation contact center framework quickly and with a limited budget.

A contact center in need of a refresh

The Bank's customer-facing contact center includes approximately 1,000 agents who receive over a million calls a month. It was imperative that the contact center and communications solution was able to provide stable, flexible, redundant, secure and scalable services.

Taking all needs into consideration, we designed a next-generation Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) solution to support over 1,500 agents that provided redundancy in utilizing their existing data centers. The solution included all hardware and software required for the solution, but the differentiator for the Bank was their ability to leverage the WWT's North American Integration Center in St. Louis to provide just-in-time delivery of hardware, provide asset management and perform pre-configuration of phones.

WWT  provided engineering and project management resources to perform design, implementation and overall project management to support the 40 contact center groups within the Bank. WWT is no stranger to large-scale and complex deployments. We employed our PDIO methodology (Plan, Design, Operate and Implement) to manage the various OEMs involved in this project and deliver a complete solution.

WWT's integration and installation teams completed the deployment in fewer than 18 months, which was ahead of schedule and under the customer's budget. The project deadline date was a vital factor due to the aging collaboration infrastructure, along with the Bank's immediate need to implement a business analytics system on top of the new contact center. The project incurred zero downtime for the customer, keeping their systems online during every critical business hour.

Identifying ultimate business objectives

WWT solution architects started the engagement with a two-day project scoping workshop, interviewing over 40 different groups that were utilizing the contact center – all with separate needs, reports and line of business functions. We used this as a launch workshop, designed to get all groups on the same page as far as solution functionality and to answer any questions that arose.

Once we began deploying to the enterprise, we placed focus on familiarizing internal teams with all solution features and functionalities. It was important to show that all their previous features were still intact, and we wanted to create comfortability with new features as well. We provided training for the agents and invited each user group from the initial discussions into the various sessions, allowing everyone to become familiar with the new system.

WWT Collaboration Labs increased speed of technology adoption

With a limited IT staff, constrained budget and outdated internal lab, training and support of the new collaboration tools proved nearly impossible for the customer. As they transitioned from the legacy UC system, the customer was concerned about the ability of the Level 2 engineers to manage the amount of service tickets that would come in as the workforce gets accustomed to the new system.

WWT's on-demand Collaboration Labs help speed the adoption of collaboration tools so customers can optimize their collaboration investments and quickly realize the desired business outcomes. The Collab Labs provide a low-cost, up-to-date, multi-OEM training and testing environment for customers to use anytime, anywhere.

All collaboration tools in place in the customer's environment were replicated in WWT's Collab Labs, and the customer can now come in, spin them up, test the functionality and tear the labs down as often as they need.

Getting Cisco and Microsoft interoperability was very important to the customer. Rather than struggling with internal MSFT teams to learn group policies and other skills needed to integrate the systems, the Regional Bank is able to leverage the Collaboration Labs to more fully engage and explore their new solution.

After leveraging the lab environment for training purposes, the customer can further engage with the Collab Labs to validate upgrades, test analytics and monitoring tools and explore new ways to use APIs to automate tasks, increasing efficiency and giving time back to their IT staff to use on more impactful projects.

Because the labs are both pre-built and customizable, the Regional Bank can alter the environment to cater to their specific needs. The multi-OEM environment ensures they can test out any solution and get support for technologies that they otherwise wouldn't have access to, with WWT labs and engineers ready to help at any time.

Investment for future growth

The new contact center environment has greatly improved the burden placed on IT operations teams, who were previously tasked with managing out-of-date devices without interrupting service to the end customer. Having this new infrastructure and the support provided by Cisco saves crucial staff resources and reduces IT expenses.

Most recently, WWT provided the customer with a 5-year Collaboration Enterprise Agreement (EA) and SMARTnet contract. The EA consolidates all unified communications (UC) licensing into a single enterprise agreement, saving the customer approximately $1 million in total collaboration licensing costs.

Not only does the solution provide significant cost savings, they also have more integration capability when implementing new digital initiatives which would have been impossible with their previous system. The Regional Bank is now able to incorporate customer analytics and monitoring platforms, voice recognition software and other contact center tools that can further strengthen their brand and create new customer experiences.