Financial institution drives business benefit from Microsoft Lync telephony and contact center solution

Netrisk.hu, a leading innovative insurance provider in Central Europe, has now updated operations by adopting Microsoft Lync, a single unified platform for integrating all customer care and internal office communication. By harnessing the integrated power and flexibility of Lync-based customer care and office communication, Netrisk.hu has improved customer care agent and sales utilization remarkably, by over 50% (utilization has increased from 45 to 68%). Notably, the company has also saved significantly on telephony and travel cost using Lync video and voice communication.
By the end of 2011, 800,000 end customers are supported and serviced using Netrisk’s Microsoft voice platform.

The customer

Netrisk is a leading innovative player on the Central European insurance market, maintaining business connections with a vast network of customers and insurance providers. Their principal vehicle for customer service is their internet portal. This is supported and extended by telephony customer care. Netrisk.hu’s core business is web portal-based comparison, configuration and sales of car, home, and travel insurance, operating in Hungary, Slovenia and Romania. Increasingly in recent years Netrisk.hu has supported its internet activity with an inbound telephony helpdesk and outbound cross-platform sales campaigns. Customer operations have strong seasonal variation, with a November–December peak in insurance re-contracting annually.

Netrisk has been the leading insurance provider for over a decade, with over 850,000 customers and 75 employees. Company operation is heavily seasonal, with a notable peak annually in November–December owing to annual insurance renewal and re-contracting. The company maintains a regional presence with offices in Hungary, Slovenia, and Romania.
Netrisk’s portal was the first in the Central European region to provide complete cross-company comparison and easy web based configuration of insurance via an internet portal. Their previous office communication has been based on an outdated Microsoft Small Business server providing Office 2003 and basic directory services.
Upper management relies heavily on mobile mailing devices and travels extensively. Company management is open to integrating new technology and innovations which support enhanced customer communication and intra-office functionality.

Business challenge

Netrisk identified the following strategic needs:

• Increase efficiency of customer care
• Open new channels to reach customers
• Increase cross sales to existing customers

To achieve this, their Hungarian operations needed to reassess how they approached proactive sales. In particular they sought to do the following:

• increase telephony and mail campaign efficiency
• introduce new media such as SMS campaigns and chat service
• modernize their old analogue telephony system — owing as well to a recent relocation

Their previous customer care operations and campaign support relied on a hosted (virtual) contact center model. Despite scalability this platform had notable limitations:

• it was not sufficiently flexible and efficient, and
• it lacked customizability to meet unique customer support and acquisition process needs

Netrisk identified customer service and its technology platform as key strategic elements in building a business critical system for gaining further competitive advantage. Therefore the company decided to insource the contact center and update their office and telephony infrastructure.

Selection criteria

In September, 2011 Netrisk set out to find a solution that meets the following criteria:

• rapid set-up and implementation — they needed professional contact center operations for their pending campaign
• sharing a common platform for contact center and office communications
• with demonstrably proven results in the financial service sector
• including or easily extendable to include such UC features as: desktop sharing, web, video and audio conference, remote and home office support, chat, and so on
• positioned as important in the future for efficient knowledge work and business communications
• with an “easy to handle” platform for implementing additional needed CTI features in the near future, such as integrating voice/telephony services with other transaction processing and CRM applications and identified significant business benefit from a solution that incorporated unified communications for both information workers and within the contact center.

Solution

Geomant proposed the Microsoft Lync telephony platform and Contact Expert for Lync contact center / customer care solution. Netrisk compared the proposed Lync based voice technology with traditional telephony vendors’ offerings, and identified significant business benefit from a solution that incorporated unified communications for both information workers and within the contact center.
The new system offered the following contact center and business features:

• efficient features for in- and outbound operations, self-service, voice and multimedia and CTI capabilities in one compact system
• industry-standard reporting set and standard financial services industry processes
• all features unified on a single platform using one integrated service
• easy to implement in a couple of days requiring no special hardware (unlike traditional IP telephony-based solutions which need special gateways, cards, and call manager hardware)
• working on a minimal hardware platform as all server components are virtualized using Microsoft Hyper-V technology

Benefits

The features of the new contact center and the unified communication revolutionized the customer care and office operations.
It resulted in several key financial benefits:

• ready to run customer care and campaign handling vehicle in 5 weeks’ time
• more efficient customer connections: agent utilization increased by 50%
• more acquisitions, and more deals settled, proving a return on investment in less than a year.

“Based on the references it seemed clear that Geomant’s solution is very efficient. Choosing Microsoft’s platform based on the faster implementation and more integrated feature set we didn’t know what the UC features would provide us. The contact center realized increased functionality, and customer care operations received more support. Contact center operators have a rich integrated desktop which shows the actual proposal which we are targeting for the connected customer in the campaign. Instant help provides situation specific scripts attached to the campaign. The interface allows us to record all customer specific details we collect during the call and analyze them later to reload into the contact center database and create even more efficient customer interactions.”
“The new system is a very significant step ahead in terms of statistics and real time reporting and presence compared to the previous one,” added Csaba Gere, Head of IT operations. “Using the new desktop and the automated functions helped us to reduce the after call work and handling time. This means our agents can spend 10-15 more minutes every hour handling customer calls. So the contact center operation got much more efficient.”
“Selecting the Lync based solution for telephony, PBX, and contact center operations we not only gained valuable time but managed to consolidate all system components on one HP industry standard server.” he continued.
“Our notebook user colleagues decided to opt for headsets and also used the softphone features of Lync. Both the softphone and the physical phones are integrated with Outlook and resulted in much easier communication. What’s more, I am very glad to use this system for more and more cross country video meetings. Previously we tried to use Skype, which always had the drawback of not being integrated into Office and Outlook” added the IT director.

Next steps

Using the new system Netrisk plans to deploy further features of Lync and Contact Expert for Lync in 2012:

• Contact center and Lync integrated web chat service
• Extension of the system for their regional operations

Birmingham, UK, June 2012:

CALL RECORDING FOR COMPLIANCE & QUALITY: Most regulated and customer-focused organisations recognise the need to record certain inbound and outbound telephone conversations, and have call recording solutions in place to achieve this. With many organisations now using Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform for enterprise voice the requirement to extend call recording to Lync becomes increasingly important.

Geomant’s Lync Call Recording solution has been developed as a result of cooperation between Geomant, a leading developer of added-value solutions for Microsoft Lync, and Verba, a call-recording specialist whose recording system is installed at more than 500 customer sites across 30 countries.

INDIANA, USA, APRIL 2012: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has deployed Geomant’s Contact Center Contact Expert for Lync to deliver their public facing Homework Hotline contact center.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology’s Homework Hotline is a unique organization, and required a unique solution. The Homework Hotline operates a true ‘virtual contact center’.

Geomant’s solution was able to deliver against all the key requirements: Lync integration, remote agent connectivity, multimedia channels, supervisor monitoring, stakeholder reporting,  customized agent scripting with data collection.

“We chose Microsoft Lync and Geomant Contact Expert because they provided the core functionality we required, including seamless reporting, and they took the time to understand our program and our program technological needs.”

Janie Szabo, Assistant Director of Operations & Education, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology’s Homework Hotline

Read the full case study here … Rose-Hulman Case Study

NEWS RELEASE

About Avaya

Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, networking and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com For more information on the Avaya DevConnect program, visit www.avaya.com/devconnect .

About Geomant

Geomant is a well-established, innovative UC Software Developer and Systems Integrator specializing in Microsoft technologies. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Geomant has offices across Europe, Australia and the Middle-East, and a global reseller network. For more information, visit www.geomant.com .

Equidebt have deployed a number of Geomant contact centre productivity solutions to complement their Avaya outbound dialing platform. These include Geomant’s Interactive Virtual Agent and Desktop Connect.

Martyn Wells, IT director for Equidebt, said the new Geomant applications had made a noticeable difference to Equidebt’s performance and productivity.

“I would certainly recommend Geomant’s products because they have made a measurable difference to our business. In terms of using the Virtual IVR Agent in blaster campaigns, we have increased our outbound calling capacity by 25 per cent. I would say that using Desktop Connect has reduced our average call time by around 16 per cent, increasing productivity and enabling us to speak to more customers at the first time of asking – a key deliverable in our line of work”.

Read the full case study here … Equidebt Case Study