CONVERGYS CASE STUDY
Central Telecom has implemented a contact centre solution for Convergys, the largest U.S.-based contact centre outsourcer, with a reputation for driving constant innovation and staying ahead of the curve in technology adoption as a key source of competitive advantage.
Convergys far outpaces any of its competitors with 7,000 plus agent seats running on VoIP.
The organisation's UK operation had disparate systems around its sites in Newcastle, Fareham, Guildford, Huntingdon and Camborne, with no uniformity. This meant that they were unable to share resource between locations and there was no disaster recovery which is a crucial requirement in a critical call centre environment.
Convergys required a standard platform across all call centres to match the US Corporate policy to enable them to share resources and a resilient infrastructure as it is the hub for Europe and the UK.
Background
Central Telecom's brief was to come up with a solution which allowed Convergys to share resource and provide a resilient infrastructure for its European and UK hub whilst ensuring a seamless transition with no disruption to service levels.
The company chose an Avaya solution as it matched their US Corporate policy and they believe that it is at the leading edge of the technology cycle, it is a quick and easy to deploy solution with an easy upgrade and migration process.
Convergys initially had a Avaya S8300 in their Fareham site and an 8300 in Guildford with all other sites having an INDeX. After looking at the existing infrastructure Central decided to design a mirrored Avaya S8700 solution incorporating the following:
- 2 x S8700's in Huntingdon at the hosting site
- 2 x S8700 in Newcastle
- S8500 LSP in Cambourne
- S8300 LSP in Fareham and Guildford
- CMS in Newcastle and Huntingdon
- AIC in Guildford
The design means that in the event of a network failure or applications server failure all agents across the entire network are still able to function, including the 500 IP Agents in India.
Proposed Solution
Convergys has earned the Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award for its leading use of VoIP technology in its contact centers. As the largest U.S.-based contact centre outsourcer, Convergys Corporation drives constant innovation and stays ahead of the curve in technology adoption as a key source of competitive advantage.
Convergys runs 7,000 plus agent seats on VoIP and started IP in its infrastructure 3 years ago with the goal of preparing for a future of convergence and enabling agents to operate in locations across the globe without sacrificing quality.
What is notable about Convergys is not only the scale of its IP operations, but also the controlled manner in which the system has been installed, which ensures quality operations for Convergys' end-user clients.
Central Telecom's experience in contact centre design and implementation and support meant that Covergys were secure in the knowledge that they had chosen the right company to implement their contact centre solution and provide ongoing support and advice. The Convergys Data Centre in Huntingdon houses the Definity Communication Manager CM2, with S8700 media servers. Huntingdon is the main hub for EMEA telephony. This site also hosts over 320 IP agents in India, with a planned roll out to over a thousand by the end of 2004.
They also have remote Gateways and S8300 servers in Guildford, Fareham, & Camborne and Budapest, running off the system in Local survivable mode. Which means that the users are all part of the main hub, but have resilience at the local site should the link between the 2 sites fail.
Convergys also have a site in Newcastle which houses 65 users which are supported by S8700 servers as in Huntingdon. When CM3 becomes available at the end of the year, the users in Newcastle will register to the Huntingdon site and the servers in Newcastle will replicate Huntingdon. In the event of Huntingdon's S8700 server's failing, or a disaster at Huntingdon etc, the Newcastle servers will step in and provide telephony to all sites running from the Huntingdon system, along with all agents in India.
It is also proposed that Edinburgh, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Israel will all become part of this structure over the next 12 months.
The system installed by Central is truly redundant, at no point is there a single element of failure and it is truly a 5 x 9's reliable environment which was not previously achievable in other vendors IP solutions.
Implementation
As Convergys provide services to Nortel, Cisco and Avaya they spent time looking at how these organisations design their products with disaster recovery and resilience in mind. The products needed to be business critical but needed the flexibility of IP. Convergys decided that Avaya was the product that best suited their needs as it not only offered true redundancy and 5 x 9's reliability but the Avaya IP was scaleable, modular, clean cut and precise with a very good upgrade path.
Some elements of the installation were challenging and meant that hardware needed to be moved whilst sites were live and on-line but Central Telecom were able to provide the very best Project Management for Convergys by using Prince 2 Project Management and Microsoft Project Manager and ensure that the installation went smoothly and that operations were not put at risk.
As Convergys provide outsource contact centres for Nortel, Avaya and Cisco, they needed to mirror their Corporate requirement to run all these products in line with their customer requests. They needed a communications partner with the ability to design and implement all the products and solutions they required and to provide them with ongoing support and maintenance and advice now and in the future.
Results
- Central Telecom was able to provide a truly redundant solution which meets 5 x 9's reliability in a critical contact centre environment.
- The IP solution met Convergys needs to share resource across all sites in the UK and India in the event of a network, application or server failure.
- As Convergys add more locations they are able to select the appropriate media server and or media gateway to continue with the resilient architecture.
- The Avaya solution provides good ROI and an easy upgrade and migration process along with a good and demonstrable roadmap for the future.
- Avaya's system was built with disaster recovery and resilience in mind but with the flexibility of IP.
- Central Telecom has delivered a future proof and workable design and also provides Convergys with maintenance of all their systems, continuity of staff and an excellent working relationship. Central also provide maintenance and support to the Avaya switch which is based at Avaya HQ in Guildford and looks after Avaya's global HR issues.
- The new solution means that Convergys gain commonality of a standard product range and reliability has increased along with trust from end users.
