Advanced Call Center Technologies (ACT) Unified Communications and Collaboration, Improving Experiences While Cutting Costs

Since 1997, ACT has been delivering outsourcing programs for customer experience sales support, fraud and dispute management, claims processing, and a variety of other programs for top U.S. organizations spanning multiple industries including healthcare, financial services, telecom, and retail. The company operates 24/7/365 from 17 locations, with both domestic U.S. and nearshore operations centers, providing service in eight different languages.

Answering the Call to be Part of the Solution

Prior to the pandemic shutdown, ACT had already begun to explore how to enhance the experience they provided for customers, employees, and system users, as well as options to create efficiencies across service consumption to aid their anticipated growth. This Total Experience review was undertaken with Avaya as its trusted partner. “Our discussions moved from hardware to software to different service delivery models,” explained Hunter Croft, President and CEO at ACT. “Those talks were just in time as we had some decisions to make regarding our contact center temporary agent licensing, which were about to expire.”

The advent of the pandemic and the huge increase in traffic accelerated the view within ACT that any solution needed to provide flexible growth in consumption in line with the needs of the business. Having reviewed all options, ACT decided to adopt a flexible subscription option that allows them to add additional licenses to their base without making a capital purchase – thus better aligned to their own business model and cash-flow. It also allows ACT to flex during peak periods and accommodate the unpredictable needs of its clients.

Increasing Collaboration While Reducing Costs

With significant business growth comes the challenge of effectively managing both the toolsets and processes for communications with management, staff, and agents, as well as externally with their clients and partners. In the absence of a central, unified solution, ACT found that the organic growth of previously little-used workstream collaboration platforms was incurring significant costs. “Due to the need for greater communications throughout the day in a work-from-home environment, usage increased, causing an uptick in costs of up to $100,000 per month for different audio and video bridges,” said Croft. At the same time, the vast majority (94%) of ACT’s employees were working from home. “Many just started using any free services out there because that’s what others were doing.”

Part of the attraction for ACT of the Avaya Subscription model was the inclusion of Avaya Spaces – Avaya’s all-in-one, cloud-based collaboration application – which is an added, included benefit. Avaya Spaces enabled Experience Builders like Hunter and the team at ACT to address the needs of all stakeholders from a single application. “It made perfect sense to introduce Avaya Spaces,” Croft said. “We began using it as a replacement for the many other video and meeting solutions we were using all over the company.” Consolidating its collaboration platforms and eliminating this redundancy increased productivity and user satisfaction while saving costs.

Introducing and standardizing on a new platform, especially when displacing entrenched practices, can be challenging and time consuming. However, the team at ACT successfully launched, trained staff and embedded new practices in less than 2 months – beating even their own ambitious goals. “A lot of change was happening all at once, and we know how hard change can be. The transition to Avaya Spaces took about 60 days. As our staff became more familiar with the platform, the adoption rate doubled in a short time,” Croft said. ACT now has thousands of active users collaborating with each other and delivering amazing experiences for customers.

Creative Collaboration Brings Great Value

The utilization, administration, security, and maintenance associated with delivering a solution for thousands of users daily is managed at ACT by a small team – testimony to the streamlined way in which they have integrated the platform. Avaya works closely with ACT to continually review usage and analytics, ensuring the optimum conditions for a company needing to deliver unique experiences that matter within a huge volume of interactions. Shortly after deployment ACT celebrated 2.8 million minutes in a single month using Avaya Spaces.

With some 11,000 agents across 17+ contact centers, and the unique requirements of multiple large-enterprise and government customers, ACT needs to maintain the skillsets and knowledge base to ensure staff are delivering the right service, every time. “We are using Avaya Spaces for agent training, some that is client-specific,” Croft said. “Having the ability to record sessions allows the trainings to be repeatable by simply sharing the recordings with various teams. The platform has also become crucial for use in interviewing and onboarding new talent.”

“We can quickly set up a Space for collaboration where we can present ideas and store documents. It creates a single place for all of us to meet and keep track of initiatives,” said Croft. “We really have utilized this platform as a big part of our strategic growth plan.”

During more open types of meetings, ACT appreciates the “Raise Hand” feature of Avaya Spaces so those in a large session can ask a question or add to the conversation without interrupting another speaker.

Maintaining Service Levels as Offices Re-open

As the mix of working locations begins to pivot back towards offices, traditional challenges associated with open-plan workplaces are being addressed in new and innovative ways. Avaya Spaces natively supports AI-powered noise cancellation in the cloud – enabling users to communicate clearly wherever they are, and whatever device they are using. “Our agent teams are using Spaces with each other, their supervisors and management. If the agents attend from the busy contact center, the noise reduction feature really makes a big difference,” said Croft. Features such as these are helping ACT reach the objectives they set for themselves early on in the adoption of Spaces, and they look forward to evolving and utilizing the rich features embedded within.

Composing Client Solutions and Building Bridges

The Avaya solution is built around the Media Processing Core – the central solution component that seamlessly links all 3 elements of business interaction – Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS), contact center and Communications APIs. This composable platform enables ACT to quickly build applications in real-time to solve client’s challenges and deliver unprecedented speed-to-value. Using Avaya Communications APIs, ACT quickly delivers exciting new client value, for example, turning up a customer survey within 24 hours. “We can drive greater communications through our tools, greater velocity and speed to market. Communications APIs help us connect all of the different components of our network into one unified approach in growing the business,” explained Croft. Leveraging the Avaya Media Processing Core to facilitate seamless interactions between technology solutions enables endless possibilities for ACT and their clients.

ACT’s partnership with Avaya not only enabled them to meet the challenges of rapid expansion and business disruption, but also gives them the confidence to plan for further growth in the future. “Every time I ask a question, our Avaya team answers, ‘I can help you with that,’ and they help us solve our problems,” Croft explained. “These are the types of people you want in your own company.”