An international financial institution, operating in nine European countries, had found a unified comms solution for its 900 staff. The plan was to move from its mixture of legacy on-premise and cloud PBXs to an 8×8 cloud-based UCaaS platform within a Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure.
Earlier attempts to migrate UK locations had not gone so well, and the teams at those locations had lost a little faith in the new technology. Since the institution relies on the one-to-one rapport it generates with its customers, it had to fix the issues before it could risk any further roll-outs.
The institution needed a dedicated project manager who could bring all the stakeholders and technological strands together, reignite passion for the solution, and create an environment in which success was the logical outcome. My task was to understand the technology, build camaraderie and a can-do mindset, and lead the team that would deliver success.
It was a steep learning curve for all of us, but our forensic and inclusive approach teased out the evidence that made the problems identifiable and fixable. Step by step, we rolled out to larger contact centres, resolving fresh issues at each stage until we could make the final, company-wide release that unlocked huge quality and performance improvements.
Migrating European financial call centres to a performance-boosting, cloud-based platform
Migration involving 900 users in six of the nine European locations (all operating to different regulatory regimes) from on-premise and cloud PBXs to an 8×8 cloud-based UCaaS platform within a Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure.
Industry
Finance – Europe’s most trusted outsourced servicer and purchaser of consumer and business loans, the recovery of which relies on building and maintaining strong personal and ethical relationships with debtors.
The Project
Project had been running for 15 months, but had stalled when the initial migrations didn’t quite go to plan. Lessons had been learned, so my role was to create a common purpose, resolve the issues, reignite enthusiasm, and get the project back on track. The plan was to take the migration step-by-step – to work collaboratively with all stakeholders to resolve the issues that caused the initial migrations to fall below the high levels of expectation, move on to a bigger location, and then resolve any new issues that might occur. Each step involved more users and more scenarios, which inevitably revealed fresh issues.
Project also required a degree of change-management: rebuilding faith in a solution that had not so far delivered its true potential, and coaching and developing team members so that they could continue after I had moved on.
Activity
- Reignite passion for the project – draw all stakeholders together for a meaningful collaboration that would resolve issues positively and with successful outcomes.
- Gathering and collation of data and information to identify what the issues were and the circumstances surrounding them. Without hard facts, no meaningful changes could be made.
- Numerous first-hand, onsite fact-finding missions across European sites to get to the root of the issues.
- Regular updates to all stakeholders and encouragement of collaborative working to resolve issues.
- Involvement of providers at the highest level to ensure that any upgrades to their applications were undertaken quickly and efficiently.
- Development of a full testing plan to ensure that the application programming interface was successfully integrated into the client’s CRM system.
- Deployment planning including training, support, Q&As, and regular meetings with all stakeholders.
- All processes repeated and concluded at each stage of the migration before moving on to the next stage.
- Learnings from each stage collated, reviewed for best practice, and fed back to all locations.
- Maintaining morale among call-centre teams as each stage of the migration revealed new issues. Making sure that all parties understood what we were doing to resolve the issues.