One of the UK’s top ten card providers. This business has always been about helping people succeed with credit, from providing innovative tools to the way it is driving positive change across the finance industry. This credit card provider prides itself on delivering simple clear and supportive services to its customers.

The 600 agents in this contact centre are tasked with connecting and delighting their customers to ensure an exceptional customer journey. In order for the agents to do their job to the best of their ability, it is important they have access to a stable and effective contact centre platform, that is not only the right solution for now but is able to provide scope for future innovation and development.

 

  • Challenge
  • Solution
  • Outcome

Challenge

The client’s contact centre technology had evolved over several years, and as such was a mixture of PBX (Private Branch Exchange) and other contact centre systems. Due to the nature of the legacy systems, the team were encountering significant technical issues, including frequent outages. This meant that the existing platform was no longer meeting the needs of the business.

The various issues that the client was experiencing were not only affecting the day to day usage of the platform, but it meant that they couldn’t deliver the innovations they wanted. The team wanted a platform that would enable them to explore future developments, such as omni-channel desktops combining email, chat, social and other channels as well as natural language voice interaction so they could continue to offer outstanding customer experience.

  • One

    Age and historic fault resolutions meant that the existing system was non-standard, unsupported and no longer followed CISCO best practice.

  • Two

    Overcomplicated call flows and call recording led to problems that affected agent efficiency and productivity.

  • Three

    An incomplete lab environment was restricting testing, creating issues when any changes were rolled out.

  • Four

    High number of abandoned calls caused by disruptive spikes in CPU usage (up to 100% every minute).

Solution

To meet the challenges faced by the client, the Natilik team worked with its contact centre team to determine the best approach to the upgrade. Through a series of joint consultations, it was concluded that a standard upgrade would not be sufficient, and that in order to improve the existing technical issues that were affecting the customer service centre’s performance, it was important to identify the root cause. After pinpointing some quick wins that would deliver immediate business benefit, the Natilik team worked with the internal team to build a road map that would target best practice and ensure that the upgrade would meet both current and future business needs.

The client appointed Natilik to deliver and support the entire system change, including responsibility to manage all vendors and technology that made up the solution, this meant the project could be run more efficiently and reduced administration time.

  • Discover

    Natilik completed a thorough technical audit and health check of the entire platform. The team used these findings to identify immediate remedies and to define target best practice architecture.

  • Design

    Natilik held a series of workshops and showcase sessions with client stakeholders to understand current and future requirements and to highlight pain points with the existing system. Using this information, Natilik provided the client with a clearly defined and documented roadmap and migration plan, incorporating key deliverables.

  • Transition

    The entire platform was upgraded to align with the target reference architecture. This was followed by extensive testing of the system to ensure all issues had been resolved before implementation. UC and CC were deployed across two data centres, including gateway refresh.

    Campaign management software was implemented and EoS was phased out, to centralise the solution. A new test platform was created to ensure that all changes could be thoroughly tested before roll out.

  • Manage

    To optimise the changeover and to minimise disruption, Natilik made use of out of hours to configure, migrate and load test the new platform. User migration was done on a queue by queue basis.

    The Natilik and internal teams continue to work together to evolve the platform so the client can continually deliver outstanding customer service, increase agent productivity and drive business efficiencies.

Outcome

The client now has a contact centre solution that is right for the business and allows the team to concentrate on offering their customers great service. Natilik will continue to work with the internal team to explore future developments and opportunities, such as omni-channel desktops, workforce management, chatbots and artificial intelligence to enhance the customer journey, optimise the use of agents’ time and to increase efficiencies.

  • Business benefits

    Using a stable and supported platform reduced technical issues that were posing a risk to business continuity. The platform also costs less to operate and is ready for future innovations.

  • Customer experience

    Customers have a more seamless experience, they are contacted less often as the system utilises intelligent data and is less prone to mistakes.

  • Agent experience

    Campaigns can be run more efficiently, increasing the productivity of each agent and reducing their frustrations. Call handling time has been reduced.

  • IT team efficiency

    The internal IT team no longer have to spend numerous hours dealing with the technical problems of the contact centre, meaning they can concentrate on making proactive improvements or other tasks.