The Customer
Symity are a supplier on the Crown Commercial Services (CCS) Network Services framework. This provides a mechanism for Public Sector organisations to select organisations to deliver high quality technical solutions for their businesses.
A large regional government organisation went to market through Network Services for a new requirement to replace their on-premises telephony PBX, serving 5500 users. They were also looking to switch their existing contact centre environment, which had 180 customer agents.
The council was looking to transform their business and was making strategic investments into Microsoft Dynamics 365, whilst leveraging existing applications such as ZoomText, Dragon and Text to Speech (TTS) services. It had already invested into Microsoft technologies through Microsoft Office 365 E5 licensing and Azure-based cloud services, utilised in their core infrastructure. Therefore, they had a desire to continue to leverage all these investments as much as possible in a new solution.
The council was seeking to deliver a high-quality and differentiating customer experience, engaging with a Unified Communications and Contact Centre partner, who could bring their organisation innovation and expertise, to help realise their strategic vision and add value.
The Challenge
The council required a fully hosted cloud telephony and contact centre solution, which would yield tangible benefits in the improved efficiencies and timeliness of service. The goal was to achieve less time spent on calls and contact centre activities and reduce administrative process timelines.
It was pivotal that the solution was both scalable and flexible, allowing for the number of users and agents to change according to the changing requirements of the business.
The contact centre had 14 key business services. Therefore, the associated processes within each service needed to be reviewed in detail, with recommendations provided to optimise and potentially redesign the services.
Where possible the council was looking to exploit new technologies, such as bots, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other Azure Cognitive Services to enable improvements in self-service across council services, driving increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
To enable regular, pro-active and insightful analysis of data, it was important that the solution would offer improved management information across the corporate telephony and contact centre environment. This would help key stakeholders to drive further improvements in service and customer experience.
As part of the proposed project ISDN connectivity, services would be decommissioned, with more modern SIP services and Session Border Controllers (SBCs) implemented. As part of the migration stage of the project, the existing phone number ranges needed to be retained and ported to the replacement SIP trunks with overall minimum practicable interruption to council services as a whole.
A hybrid project management approach needed to be adopted, with PRINCE2 methodology applied to the implementation phase and an Agile approach being taken to training, configuration, set-up and User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
The Solution
Symity have delivered a cloud-hosted and fully managed solution for the council, built by combining our Microsoft Teams Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS) and the Microsoft-certified Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud contact centre service.
The service is based on a native Microsoft Teams experience, utilising the Microsoft supported capability of Direct Routing. This allowed us to provide highly available, dynamically scalable voice infrastructure, meeting the current and future requirements of the organisation.
Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud is an enterprise-class omni-channel dialogue management solution, which integrates natively with Microsoft Teams. Together, these offered the council a single, simple and modern communications platform, which is both concise and visually clear.
Telephone numbers were ported to the Symity UK SIP service, comprising carrier services, provisioned as active standby to provide a resilient SIP service between the SBCs. The SBCs were connected to the Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud service to provide contact centre and call recording services.
Anywhere365 not only manages customer dialogues at the point of contact, but also adds context to the interaction by leveraging AI capabilities delivered through Azure Cognitive Services. Self-service options can provide real-time language detection, translation and routing for speech and chat.
The contact centre platform will drive efficiencies for the council, with less time spent on interactions with clients. This is achieved through several features and functions. Automation through chatbots, improved workflows, skills base routing and supervisor management of agents all contribute towards time savings, which enable the council contact centre agents to be more productive.
The Results
The solution from Symity combining DraaS and Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud has provided a modern, future proofed telephony and contact centre solution for the council. This meets the current and future challenges faced in local regional government in delivering exceptional customer service.
Using a structured and high-quality delivery approach, we ensured that the compelling solution was deployed successfully on-time, risks were mitigated, all the functional requirements were met, as well as the expectations of the key council stakeholders and most importantly the users.
The platforms now allow the telephony and contact centre users to work from anywhere, allowing for both remote and hybrid working models where required. Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud has been pivotal in providing an ease to use contact centre platform, fully integrated with Microsoft Teams which saves agents time and delivers excellent customer service to citizens.
Redesigned call and workflows have driving efficiencies across the business services, using techniques such as deflection, self-service and automation. Those contacting the council have seen an improvement in customer experience, and overall there are associated costs savings where contact time is reduced. This enables agents to focus on more complex tasks and client interactions.
Symity have delivered a fully managed service including service introduction, support during migration to the new service, end-user adoption to maximise usage (including multi-layered training documentation) and support for a successful launch. The deployment is underpinned by a clearly defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Support Service for the council. It delivers high-quality ongoing support, timely responses to any issues and contract management for the entire solution.