The Customer
Name / Business: Local and central governments via G-Cloud framework
(enables public sector clients to procure a range of cloud hosted solutions)
Locations: Several district and borough councils, with a total work force of 6000 employees – 200 contact centre agents working across seven distinct contact centres
Service: Cloud hosted solutions for telephony and contact centre services
The Challenge
- Current contact centre solution was outsourced to a third party provider and the contract end date was approaching
- Goal:
- To replace the existing platforms with a fully cloud hosted solution, which would drive efficiencies for their staff and ultimately their citizens
- A modern contact centre solution, integrated with the core telephony platform, which would deliver exceptional customer service alongside high quality voice services across their organization
- The platform needed to be:
- Easy to use so that the council could self-serve as much as possible with regards to the management and administration of the platform
- Flexible and scalable, allowing the council to adapt to meet the growing demands of services expected by their citizens
- Microsoft Skype for Business Enterprise Voice was already deployed as the council’s primary voice platform, utilising Orace Session Border Controllers (SBCs) together with Gamma Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunks
- Microsoft Teams had been deployed alongside Skype for Business in Islands Mode, but was used primarily for collaboration rather than voice
- Existing Skype for Business Enterprise Architecture could not be leveraged as a primary Private Branch Exchange (PBX) with a new Microsoft Teams certified Contact Centre solution and therefore would need to be replaced with a full Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice solution
- To deploy with minimal impact to the council employees and citizens, with full continuity of all services
The Solution
- Multi-tenanted Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS) to provide Microsoft Teams Telephony to the contact centre agents and replace the use of Skype for Business for voice
- Anywhere35 Dialogue Cloud, allowing for future growth of services and leveraging more advanced functionality through the Dialogue Studio low-code environment built into the platform
- Steps:
- Discovery and design phase, capturing all the key details of the existing contact centres and scoping the work required to deliver improved services
- Fully documented, including a network impact assessment, and shared with key stakeholders at the council for agreement
- Integration approach: a single number port exercise was completed, with a strategic end-state achieved, where calls would be retained within Microsoft Teams without traversing the legacy Skype for Business infrastructure
- The multi-tenanted DRaaS was configured with load-balancing and automatic failover, dedicated SIP trunks were deployed to the council’s Teams tenant and resilient SIP trunks were put in place to the Anywhere365 Dialogue platform
- Concurrent dialogue licenses were provided to enable agent interactions with citizens, with omni-channel licensing enabled for a segment of the agents, so they could use channels beyond voice to communicate with customers
- A pilot and acceptance exercise for each contact centre, with User Acceptance Testing (UAT) playing a key part in the success of each Unified Contact Centre (UCC)
- Interactive training sessions, delivered by Symity’s Adoption and Training Team for Microsoft Teams for all contact centre agents and supervisors to provide the knowledge and skills to be able to leverage Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud effectively
- Floor walking was made available for the initial launch of a segment of the contact centres and subsequent go-lives, with Early Life Support (ELS) also provided for a number of weeks to ensure smooth transition to business as usual for the new services
The Results
The new Microsoft Teams Telephony service and Microsoft certified Contact Centre Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud platform were successfully designed, deployed and adopted by the council within the required timeline.
The migration approach adopted ensured there was no impact to the current services.
The council is already seeing significant efficiencies in the delivery of services for their citizens.
Customer journeys within the contact centre have been improved and the council continues to work with Symity on further phases of configuration of services within Anywhere365 Dialogue, where they are looking to enable automation and self-service for their citizens driving improvements in customer satisfaction.
Support for the new environments is delivered by the Service Desk Team at Symity. As our consultants continue to work with the council and new services are made live, we ensure that these handed over into support seamlessly.
Through regular service reviews, as developments take place with the Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud platform, Symity ensures that the council is abreast of new features and functionality so they can look to build them into future citizen facing services.