The Avaya advantage

Amicus turned to Avaya, and that choice was sufficient to win the trust of some customers. “Just having an Avaya solution gets us more customers,” explains Charles Burns, Commercial Director at Amicus. “Certain clients will work with you only if you have an Avaya telephony infrastructure. It’s as simple as that. Nowadays, our clients and potential clients understand outsourcing. They acknowledge that Avaya provides probably the best and most reliable contact-center platform out there. From our perspective, that makes it a low risk solution.”

Managed by Avaya Communication Manager, the contact center runs across a network of Avaya Cajun network switches and an Avaya media server. What’s more, all on-site agents have been provided with Avaya IP telephones. Avaya’s Unified Messenger for Microsoft Exchange allows Amicus to effectively manage all communication, be it e-mail, voice mail, or fax.

Profiting from VoIP

The decision to implement a VoIP solution revolved largely around reducing costs, but it was also a question of practicality.

“Four years ago, I considered VoIP, but it’s amazing how it has moved on,” says Charles Burns. “We are based in a grade 2 listed building, so cabling presented us with a challenge. We couldn’t just start drilling holes all over the place. By going with a VoIP solution, however, the amount of cabling and drilling required was literally halved.” What’s more, because everything runs over IP, the infrastructure can be extended with wireless LAN capability as the need arises.

More importantly, perhaps, the VoIP contact center plays a key role in the company’s mobile communications strategy — a strategy that, in the medium to long term, should lead to increased revenue. Amicus started using teleworkers, working from their homes. Avaya software allowed the remote workers to use the same communications technology as the personnel in the office. Amicus’s mobile needs are growing, with an increasing number of agents slated for off-site work.

All teleworkers at Amicus are connected using an Avaya virtual private network (VPN), which provides the level of security needed when working with potentially sensitive corporate information. Plans are for agents to use the Avaya IP softphone as a way of standardizing the desktop environment across the entire company and ensuring consistency of features. The soft-phone enables remote workers to use their laptop or PDA as a phone, saving additional expenditures on separate phones. Also, softphones route calls across the corporate network at a lower cost than through the public network.

Increased mobility at a lower cost

These cost savings provide Amicus with a more competitive business position. “Our mobile strategy should allow us to compete with India and South Africa as far as cost is concerned,” Charles Burns explains. “On average, outsourcing companies are able to charge £8 per agent hour in those markets in contrast to the U.K., where costs are typically three times as much. That’s why so many U.K. businesses end up outsourcing there. With our IP-enabled teleworkers, we can offer a far more competitive, U.K.-based service.”

What’s more, Amicus’s cost-effective mobile strategy should prove invaluable as the business continues to grow. “It will not be long before we outgrow our physical facilities. At that point, our mobile strategy will make the business more flexible and scalable. It will enable us to employ more staff, including those who have difficulty leaving home, such as disabled workers and single parents. Potentially it will offer increased flexibility within the working environment.”

Setting the standard

Ensuring adequate staffing levels is obviously crucial to delivering a high standard of customer service. Answering 90 percent of its inbound calls in just 10 seconds, the company exceeds the industry standard, which is 90 percent of calls in 15 seconds. This high level of service is also due to the close integration of Avaya products within the workplace.

For example, thanks to the call-blending capability of Avaya Computer Telephony (ACT), agents can switch between campaigns for different clients quickly and effectively as the need arises. When the volume of incoming calls can’t be handled by the assigned agents, call blending automatically redirects some of the calls to outbound agents so overflow is absorbed

Quick off the mark

The close integration of Avaya products also enables Amicus to react quickly to clients’ demands, thereby providing a huge competitive advantage. “Because everything is integrated, we’re generally able to get campaigns up and running in a matter of days. And that gives us a massive competitive advantage,” says Charles Burns. “Last week a client came to us on Wednesday, and we had his campaign ready to go by the end of the day Friday.”

Standing out from the competition

Amicus’s comprehensive contact-center solution enables the company to differentiate its services from its competitors in a number of ways. Their mobile strategy allows the company to use teleworkers and keep operating costs to a minimum. The result is highly competitive pricing and the flexibility to increase staffing levels as the business continues to expand.

At the same time, with a number of Avaya products working in tandem, Amicus continues to improve the efficiency of its call handling and its ability to respond to unique customer demands. It’s all a way of helping to ensure that Amicus continues to stand out from the competition. With Avaya solutions throughout its contact center and business, that’s exactly what Amicus is doing.

More Time for Road Warriors

It’s always refreshing to see a vendor use the same solutions they’re selling in the marketplace — in essence putting their money where their mouth is. The Avaya global sales force is using one of the company’s newest tools to communicate faster, collaborate more easily, and respond more effectively to customers. In the process, they’re adding productive minutes to their day, equal to 15 additional days each year.

By providing a single interface where global users can access voice and e-mail messages, check calendars, create conference calls, and dial any of their contacts — all by voice command — Avaya Unified Communication Center (UCC) helps these road warriors make the most of their busy days.

“UCC is an incredibly valuable tool,” says an Avaya client executive who travels the length and breadth of Arizona to serve his customers. “I can be in my car for a three-hour trip, and I use the speech-access feature to hear my voice and e-mail messages. That makes those hours absorbed by travel time highly productive for me and the other members of my team. And I can respond to my customers the day they message me, instead of later that night.”

Driving productivity

To receive a go-ahead, every Avaya information technology project must deliver tangible benefits. One of those go-ahead benefits is enhanced productivity. The Avaya IT organization developed a business case showing how UCC, when used by the company’s highly mobile workers, would deliver both productivity gains and enhance the global Avaya sales team’s speed and flexibility in responding to customers. And using Avaya UCC would showcase the company’s commitment to the power of converged communications.

Convergence can happen in two ways, explains a senior project manager for messaging technologies. Convergence of the communications infrastructure — sending both voice and data over a single path — provides substantial cost savings, yet it is transparent to the end-user. UCC, on the other hand, enables a convergence of communication functions that are quite visible and valuable for the end-user. The user now benefits from convergence by working faster and more productively.

Creating the most powerful cell phones on earth

Avaya began the UCC rollout starting with some of the com-pany’s most dedicated road warriors: the global sales team.

A new workflow method

Avaya’s UCC features an advanced voice response and control capability that gives users the power to conduct a multitude of messaging, communication, and task-management activities over the telephone — all through voice commands.

When users log into the UCC by phone, they step into what the senior IT manager calls “a new way of conducting your workflow.”

Managing messages

Users can listen to voice mail headers and messages and, using UCC’s text-to-speech capability, listen to fax headers, e-mail headers, or entire e-mail messages. They can then reply to those messages, forward them with or without voice comment, save or delete them, and create and address new voice and e-mail messages.

Even in the midst of a message, a user can interrupt message playback and call the sender or anyone in the user’s contact list or the corporate directory. It’s all accomplished with voice commands. When the “side call” is finished, the UCC returns the user automatically to the place where the original message was interrupted, down to the exact word where you left off.

“I use UCC for everything it’s designed for — listening to messages, replying to messages and making outbound calls,” says a sales director who travels a five-state mid-Atlantic sales territory. “I have my cell phone with a headset. When I get back to the office, I’ve usually knocked out all the messages and all the reactive stuff — I’ve handled all that on my way back in. UCC makes me a lot more efficient and productive because my time in the car is no longer dead time.”

Managing messages has never been easier for commuters. Gone are the days of arriving at work with a message-light burning, e-mails stacked up, and customers waiting. The regular morning backlog can be disposed of before you even arrive at the office, during traditional commuting downtime.

Making calls and conferencing

Unified Communication Center users can dial anyone in their contact list or corporate directory simply by saying the person’s name. Users have extensive call control options, such as transfer, hold, merge, or drop call. And they can create instant conference calls, using voice commands.

“I use UCC for calling from the road because I don’t want to be fooling with my PDA, looking up a telephone number, while I’m driving,” says a client executive. “I don’t even have to touch my keypad — I just talk to it. I am truly hands — and eyes — free while driving, which is much safer than fumbling with a cell phone directory or PDA.”

Managing contacts and tasks

Users also have the ability to manage personal contacts, calendar entries, and tasks in Microsoft Exchange. They can manage “reach me” options such as Find Me, screen incoming calls, and set Microsoft Exchange reminders while they are mobile.

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A major productivity payoff

For Avaya, the payoff came in the form of significant productivity gains. UCC enabled Avaya users to turn unproductive hours into time well spent.

“I’ve been playing in this space for eight or nine years now,” says an IT manager. “In the surveys we’ve done, we find that just unifying e-mail and voice mail alone saves the serious road warrior about 30 minutes a day. They don’t have to do a separate logon session through their PC, and most importantly, they can respond to customers or co-workers much more quickly and efficiently. That’s tangible.”

Thirty minutes a day is more significant than it may seem. The numbers add up to impressive potential productivity gains. A half hour saved per day equals 15 days of additional productive time per user per year. When all 1700 salespeople reach that usage level, Avaya will have increased the potential productivity of the sales team by the equivalent of 25,500 person-days per year — a productivity boost of more than 6 percent.

“How do you apply that productivity?” the IT manager asks. “That depends on your organization. You could drive sales with existing customers, focus on prospecting to gain new customers, or strengthen customer satisfaction because you are more responsive.” Those are choices any executive would enjoy.

By fostering more productive internal collaboration, speeding responsiveness to customers, and turning downtime into productive time, UCC helps Avaya salespeople work more effectively and efficiently. UCC gives mobile workers more control over their work and their time, and gives Avaya more effective feet on the street.

Investment Protection

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) updates its communications infrastructure frequently to ensure that employees and members enjoy the benefits of the most advanced technologies. When the five-year lease on the museum’s Siemens PBX telephone system neared expiration in 2004, IT Director Leo Ballate had several reasons to radically improve the existing communications infrastructure. His group was wasting too many hours managing basic moves, adds, and changes. The voice mail system failed continually. In addition, annual maintenance costs in the neighborhood of $65,000 far exceeded the value of the existing system.

“Not only did we have to manage separate directories for the phones, the call accounting, and voice mail, but we also had to manage and maintain the copper infrastructure,” says Ballate. “It was a huge drain on productivity, and it was costing too much money.”

Manageability and affordability were not the only reasons Ballate was eager to steer the museum toward a new approach to communication. With 50,000 members, an elite Board of Directors, and a wealth of private donors, the institution relied heavily on the functionality of its three call centers for its success as a midsized nonprofit organization. Unfortunately, the current voice infrastructure could not handle the demand.

“Toward the end of our lease,” Ballate recalls, “we literally had no voice mail system — and no support from our vendor — during our busiest three months of the year. No one could get a live person on the phone. People were telling me that the phone just rang and rang. We really don’t want to be hearing that from our high-profile donors.”

SFMOMA faced a critical decision. “Either we would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep old technology from a vendor that let us down on numerous occasions,” says Ballate, “or we would scan the industry for new technology and find a solution more in line with the goals of our business, something less expensive to operate that didn’t compromise on scalability.”

Over the past few years, VoIP technology had advanced enough that Ballate felt the museum was ready to streamline communications by merging voice onto the data network. His reasoning was straightforward. “We believed a converged network would minimize our management activity, help us regain lost productivity, and help reduce our recurring costs. And by tackling these challenges, we could better serve the needs of our employees while ensuring more personalized relationships with our patrons and donors.”

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Factoring trust into the solution

For SFMOMA, the search for the right VoIP solution was about more than selecting an easy-to-use, manageable array of hardware and software — it was about building a relationship with a cooperative vendor. The museum’s previous experience had clearly highlighted the importance of combining effective technology with superior vendor support and trust.

Chief among SFMOMA’s requirements was the need to leverage its existing data infrastructure from Extreme Networks. The IT group had time and resources invested in managing and administering their existing technology, and Ballate wanted to get the biggest return possible from that expertise. The logical answer was to select a VoIP solution that could interoperate well with Extreme.

Initially, Ballate investigated Cisco technology, but when representatives encouraged him to drop Extreme in an effort to promote Cisco hardware, Ballate backed down. “I wasn’t thrilled with that approach,” he recalls, “so I went to Extreme and asked who they would recommend.”

After reviewing a handful of case studies and watching demonstrations firsthand, Ballate learned about a more powerful horse in the running: Avaya. Extreme felt that the Avaya solution was the optimal choice for its network in terms of performance and reliability. And unlike Cisco, Avaya offered an application-based model, which Ballate considered a compelling advantage. SFMOMA’s IT group could simply plug in the phones, assign them IP addresses, and manage them as appliances.

“Cisco had us headed toward a rack full of Windows 2000 servers, which meant more to manage as far as critical updates, security, and vulnerability were concerned,” says Ballate. “Our objective was to decrease the management burden. We were much more interested in going with an appliance model, so we chose Avaya.”

Concrete business benefits

From day one of deployment, the new Avaya solution has had a positive effect on the museum’s daily business.

Easier network management

With only a single converged network to administer and the advantages of IP telephony at hand, Ballate’s team is no longer spending valuable time managing repetitive line changes.

“Finally,” he praises, “no more cross-connects. No more visits to the closet. We just plug in a phone, configure it, and take it out to the employee’s desk. And often, it doesn’t even need to be a telecom person that installs the phone. My administrative assistants can say, ‘I’m taking this phone to Mary’s desk,’ plug it in, and it’s ready to go. That’s a tremendous timesavings.”

The Avaya Communication Manager software also contributes greatly to the solution’s enhanced manageability. To begin with, deployment of Avaya Modular Messaging is practically self-service. Virtually all of the museum’s employees have been able to keep up with the gradual rollout of applications by downloading and installing various components on their own, from their own desks. Additionally, Avaya Communication Manager includes a built-in feature called Avaya Expert Systems Diagnostic Tools that, in many instances, enables the software to self-heal should errors occur.

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Cost savings soar

Streamlined management of the communications infrastructure is dramatically decreasing SFMOMA’s maintenance expenses. Whereas the museum was spending an average of $65,000 per year on its previous system, Ballate now estimates the annual bill at only $30,000. This savings is also due to a contract for Product Support Services with Avaya Global Services that enables even faster troubleshooting and administration of all the museum’s IP-telephony-related devices.

Furthermore, the museum is getting a better return on its investment now that IT staff spend less time managing user endpoints and more time on core business tasks.

“I would say each IT staff member saves an average of three hours weekly thanks to the Avaya solution,” says Ballate. “Roughly translated, that’s about $9000 a month that our team now redirects toward tackling more vital business challenges. Combine these figures with our substantially decreased maintenance bill, and the Avaya solution will pay for itself easily within about 24 to 36 months.”

Enhanced productivity

Since deploying an IP-based system, SFMOMA significantly simplified communications usage, so employees gain valuable information faster, direct greater attention to business tasks, and increase overall productivity. For example, thanks to straightforward prompts and more reliable technology, callers are no longer lost in voice mail. Speed dial is actually speedy now that employees push fewer buttons to call frequently dialed numbers. And with the ongoing implementation of Avaya Modular Messaging software, users are able to access their voice, fax, and e-mail messages at any time from a diverse array of devices, including cell phones and soft-phones. As a result, employees can respond with accuracy and agility to each other, as well as to members and donors.

“Everything about the Avaya solution is easier to use,” says Ballate. “IT people usually only hear when things go wrong, but since deploying the Avaya solution, we are being stopped in the hall by employees who have to tell us how much they love their new phones and their increased functionality. In my ten years at SFMOMA, I have never had users come up and tell us how great our technology is until now.”

Better services and applications

SFMOMA employees are enjoying the benefits of an advanced communications infrastructure that puts greater control in their hands, even when they’re away from their desks. Ballate’s team, for example, is currently test-driving the Avaya IP softphone, which allows users to place and receive phone calls from a laptop or PC through integration with Microsoft Outlook contact lists and other directories. “I feel like I don’t even touch my phone anymore,” Ballate says. “I just do it all on the screen.”

Next on the agenda is a built-in “meet me” conferencing feature that automatically facilitates group calls of up to six participants and eliminates the need to spend money on a third-party service. Also high on the priority list is the implementation of Avaya Unified Communication Center, which allows both office-based and mobile users to retrieve critical information through any telephone using basic, intuitive speech commands. Workers in the field will find productivity further boosted with the addition of Extension-to-Cellular capabilities, which seamlessly bridge calls from Avaya Communication Manager to any cellular phone. “Our curators travel all the time,” says Ballate. “These mobility solutions will be perfect for them, and our donors will no doubt appreciate the easier accessibility to our staff.”

Furthermore, Ballate feels SFMOMA now has the critical partnership behind its communication infrastructure that was sorely needed. “Avaya has been here for us through everything,” he states. “I did a lot of research before making this decision, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t that hard. Everything pointed towards Avaya as the clear leader in IP telephony, and we are happy to have this solution help drive our business forward.”