To meet its goal to provide best in class customer service, Vonage turned to Avaya Inc. (NYSE:AV), a leading global provider of business communications applications, services and systems, to expand its customer service capabilities and greatly increase the number of callers the company handles daily. For example, customer calls from the UK will be routed to Vonage's UK-customer trained Global customer care team in the US and will experience better service due to the SIP-based 'presence' telephony and contact centre solutions used by the care team in the US.
As the market for broadband telephony becomes increasingly competitive, an emphasis on customer satisfaction will help give Vonage the edge to continue its growth.
"Our vision is to provide world-class customer service," said Kerry Ritz, managing director, Vonage UK. "To do that, we needed to make a number of changes - starting with an intelligent communication solution that would help us maximise the customer experience."
Building from the company's existing call centre, Vonage and Avaya Global Services collaborated on a design that would expand capacity and enable it to serve as the core platform for its worldwide customer service operations. Essential elements of the technology strategy included a SIP-based platform that could tightly integrate with Vonage's own SIP-based, VoIP phone service and existing network. SIP is an emerging protocol that enables seamless interoperability among various media, including audio, video, instant messaging and presence. Also, Vonage needed a stable, highly reliable and available business communication platform to perform well during peak call times. The Avaya system offers Vonage the flexibility to scale to global proportions and to seamlessly hand off calls to other centres when volumes hit critical mass.
"We see a dynamically scalable customer care organisation that enables us to leverage resources from any location, whenever and wherever they're most needed," said Ritz. "With Avaya's real-time, right-time communications approach, we will be able to 'think globally and act locally' from a customer service perspective."
Based on Avaya Customer Interaction Suite and powered by Avaya Communication Manager IP Telephony software, the main contact centre will serve as a hub for other customer care centres as they open around the world. The integration of SIP into Avaya solutions heightens interoperability with other Vonage applications and networks. Additionally, new SIP-based capabilities in Avaya's Customer Interaction Suite can enable Vonage agents to establish 'buddy lists' of fellow agents or experts located anywhere in the business who could be quickly tapped through presence and instant messaging while a customer is on the line.
"It was important to us that Avaya's portfolio of business communication applications supported standards like SIP - the technology core of Vonage's service offering - that will easily integrate with other business applications and which create value on top of the network," said Ritz.
For Vonage, the contact centre upgrade has simultaneously improved customer satisfaction and agent productivity. "Since implementing the new solutions, we handle more calls, wait times are significantly down and agent productivity is up," said Ritz.