Reaping rewards

HCL BPO, a division of HCL Technologies Limited, is a dominant player in the business process outsourcing (BPO) field with more than 11,400 rofessionals operating out of India, the United Kingdom and the United States, running 21 delivery centres. It offers 24x7x365 multichannel, multilingual support to international customers.

As a leading provider of BPO solutions, HCL needed to distinguish its services from other players in the market and was looking at deploying a unified multimedia solution which could cater to its multi-location operations. They were looking for a solution that is robust, scalable and redundant and can comply with government-mandated industry regulations. Moreover the solution should be able to address the domestic and International market requirement according to Department of Telecommunications, India (DOT) Guidelines.

In addition, HCL BPO recognised that it needed an advanced solution that could also help it meet Do Not Call requirements and improve outbound call campaign accuracy by effectively detecting answering machines, fax machines or busy signals. In addition, the company was also interested in advanced call blending capabilities so that sales agents would be able to manage inbound inquiries when there is an influx of customer service calls. And, as the company began to explore new contact centre technology, it also determined it wanted to reduce the costs and complexity of integrating disparate point solutions.

HCL BPO had been using a legacy dialling solution from Aspect. After a detailed evaluation of other industry solutions, it saw the potential value that migrating to a unified platform could bring to their growing business needs and decided to migrate to the Aspect Unified IP platform product.

Following strong recommendations and its own past experiences with Aspect, HCL BPO is leveraging 300 seats of Aspect Unified IP in its contact centre. Aspect Unified IP unites inbound, outbound and blended multichannel contact (voice, email, web and fax), in an IT-ready, Microsoft .Net Web services platform product that brings together customer contact capabilities

to help organisations execute on their unified communications strategies.

The solution implementation was successfully completed by HCL Infinet Ltd., Aspect’s systems integration partner for this project, meeting HCL BPO’s timelines. Aspect Unified IP seamlessly integrates with the company’s Microsoft customer relationship management (CRM) customer database systems due to its open standards platform. It enables agents to use advanced outbound dialling features to contact consumers in a series of predictive and preview modes, enabling HCL BPO to increase the accuracy of outbound connects filtering positive voice calls from fax tones and answering machines. It also provides seamless blending of inbound and outbound calls, which enables the contact centre to increase agent productivity because

administrators can make real-time changes to system settings, like call flows or agent properties.

The company is also using LYRICall, a browser-based application and scripting design tool. The calls trigger screen pops on the agent’s desktop, helping HCL BPO agent’s access company information and customer history and relay this information, as needed.

The biggest differentiator of the project was the deployment of VMware using SAN (Storage Area Network) with Aspect Unified IP 6.5.1, which has resulted in a significant reduction in physical machines count. With this server consolidation, HCL BPO is running more applications on fewer physical machines, lowering the cost of ownership, operations and maintenance.

Moreover, this has given HCL BPO flexibility to increase the capacity by adding more virtual machines on additional physical servers without requiring any reinstallation. Another advantage of VMware deployment is that the virtual machines may be replicated on a regular basis to ensure a rapid failover, when needed.

Results

HCL BPO is seeing a significant improvement in the contact centre’s productivity. With answering machine detection (AMD) accuracy of up to 95 percent, Aspect Unified IP allows agents to reach customers and prospects more effectively. This has resulted in increasing customer connect by 13 percent and reducing agent idle time by 25 percent.

In addition, the agents’ sales pitches are more productive with the assistance of LYRICall. The product provides easy-to-use scripting pop-ups on the agents’ desktop, enabling them to deliver a consistent and positive customer experience. This has also led to agent productivity improvements of 10 percent.

The unified reporting capabilities of Aspect Unified IP has eliminated the need to integrate reporting data from multiple point products and deliver a comprehensive view of the contact centre performance.

Aspect’s compatibility with VMware and its thin client interface is seamlessly supporting the HCL BPO distributed environment. Moreover, system maintenance and administration has simplified both, from IT and operation’s viewpoint. Also, due to reduction in the count of physical servers HCL BPO has also observed a drop in the power and cooling expenditures at their

datacentre.