Migrating European financial call centres to a performance-boosting, cloud-based platform

Migrating European financial call centres to a performance-boosting, cloud-based platform

Industry:

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:

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.
  • Putting systems in place to overcome language barriers between teams and locations.
  • Ensuring that systems were compliant with the various regulatory regimes within which the client operated.

The Outcome:

The project was an outstanding success that achieved results above and beyond the initial high expectations. It was also good for the project team and project partners because we were able to share numerous learnings from the project. An example is the way that the technology partner, 8×8, benefitted from our new-found knowledge contributing to a Citrix certification. We were able to support 8×8 in development and further enhancements to their UCaaS solution and API whilst deploying into a Citrix-optimised virtual desktop infrastructure. This contributed significantly to a fully working integration with the client’s bespoke CRM.

  • Simplification of supply chain.
  • Less hardware needed, as solution delivered via softphones and thin clients within a virtual desktop infrastructure, aligning with ICT strategy.
  • Retiring high total cost of ownership technical debt.
  • Taking costs out of the business.
  • Improved voice quality, full call recording, better call-quality management, and performance-enhancing speech analytics.
  • Seamless communications platform involving all communications channels and all forms of internal and external communication (integrated contact centre, voice, video, chat, and APIs).
  • Streamlining of operations through rationalisation of numerous contact-centre queues.
  • Increased visibility of the performance of the contact centres in all European locations with a common reporting best practice to give management the ability to better manage their resource and ultimately provide an even better service to the end customers.
  • Fewer abandoned calls means better and more efficient customer service.
  • Establishment of a common platform and blueprint for future locations for the client.
finance case study

Migrating European financial call centres to a performance-boosting, cloud-based platform

Migrating European financial call centres to a performance-boosting, cloud-based platform

Industry:

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:

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.
  • Putting systems in place to overcome language barriers between teams and locations.
  • Ensuring that systems were compliant with the various regulatory regimes within which the client operated.

The Outcome:

The project was an outstanding success that achieved results above and beyond the initial high expectations. It was also good for the project team and project partners because we were able to share numerous learnings from the project. An example is the way that the technology partner, 8×8, benefitted from our new-found knowledge contributing to a Citrix certification. We were able to support 8×8 in development and further enhancements to their UCaaS solution and API whilst deploying into a Citrix-optimised virtual desktop infrastructure. This contributed significantly to a fully working integration with the client’s bespoke CRM.

  • Simplification of supply chain.
  • Less hardware needed, as solution delivered via softphones and thin clients within a virtual desktop infrastructure, aligning with ICT strategy.
  • Retiring high total cost of ownership technical debt.
  • Taking costs out of the business.
  • Improved voice quality, full call recording, better call-quality management, and performance-enhancing speech analytics.
  • Seamless communications platform involving all communications channels and all forms of internal and external communication (integrated contact centre, voice, video, chat, and APIs).
  • Streamlining of operations through rationalisation of numerous contact-centre queues.
  • Increased visibility of the performance of the contact centres in all European locations with a common reporting best practice to give management the ability to better manage their resource and ultimately provide an even better service to the end customers.
  • Fewer abandoned calls means better and more efficient customer service.
  • Establishment of a common platform and blueprint for future locations for the client.