A global retailer sought to migrate from their
traditional Frame Relay network to a more scalable MPLS network for all
their four hundred plus stores. A newer Point of Sale (POS) application
had been developed and tested for production and the retailer needed to
make sure they could supply sufficient bandwidth to all stores for not
only the new POS application, but also for converged voice and data. The
retailer also needed to make sure they could provision the Quality of
Service in the network to guarantee certain Service Level Agreements to
their stores for accessing the newer applications. As a result, service
levels would be a primary concern during this migration.
Transcend United developed a fully meshed MPLS network
design and highlighted how the stores could increase their bandwidth
using MPLS while decreasing costs coming off the Frame Relay network. We
also provisioned the MPLS network with Quality of Service tiers to
ensure good communication between sites and headquarters. Our engineers
on the project team design a network that tripled the bandwidth to the
stores and decreased the total spend at the stores by leveraging the
MPLS network for converged voice which lowered the stores operating
expense in telecom billing.
The Transcend United approach eliminated the need to have
separate data and voice at each store while increasing the bandwidth
needed to support the new POS implementation. The client realized
significant savings by migrating to the MPLS network solution. This
solution allows for a fully integrated environment, leveraging the
cross-platform benefits of Data services.
Technologies & Techniques
- Technology Consulting
- Strategy
- Data Network
This large retail chain's contact center and data
network was not scaling to handle growth of the business. The legacy
telephony system was very complex, and adding agents and users was
costly and not always done in a timely manner. Despite the company's
previous efforts to improve system performance, the system was quickly
becoming a serious bottleneck to the business, and stood to limit
production in the next major sales cycle. The data infrastructure was
also antiquated and would not fulfill the necessary requirements for a
new IP system. The retailer needed to understand how a new data
infrastructure would be designed to support the IP telephony system. The
project would entail a new data architecture and IP Telephony solution
fully integrated to support the customer service center for order
fulfillment. With a projected annual growth of 30% and a backlog of
changes pending on the system; this company needed a solution that could
scale.
Transcend United was brought in to help the client
transition the system to a new IP platform that would integrate with
their existing systems and would scale to meet their growing business
needs. Working under an aggressive schedule, a Transcend United team designed
an application architecture that ensured both portability and
scalability. At the same time, our team developed a proof-of-concept
that demonstrated the performance results under this new architecture.
With the architecture proven, Transcend United migrated the application to
the new architecture within the schedule and under budget, improving
performance by an order of magnitude and ensuring that the seasonal
needs of the business were met.
Technologies & Techniques
- IP Telephony
- Contact Center
- Data Infrastructure Services
A retail enterprise approached Transcend United for help
with the implementation of a new customer support center designed to
handle all national calls for campaigns. These campaigns, which optimize
plan-selection decisions for customers, often operate "close to the
core" of merchandise-buying consumers. In this case, the campaigns would
also need to be recorded for quality assurance, accuracy and training
purposes. The new center also need to make a decision on an IP Telephony
platform.
Transcend United designed and recommended numerous solutions
for the retailer that would address their requirements and meet the
timeframes of the project. After careful considerations from many
vendors, the retailer decided to select Transcend United to implement a fully
integrated contact center, IP telephony platform and call recorder.
Transcend United integrated approach significantly reduces the amount of
repetitive programming required for future deployment of agents and
supervisors, and results in components that can be reused as the
application grows. The client enjoys simplified application maintenance
and now has a benchmark by which it can measure the quality and success
of future campaigns and customer service.
Technologies & Techniques
- IP Telephony
- Customer Support Center
- Call Recording
This regional wireless retailer lacked real-time
visibility into the state of its customer service desk. Although there
were a variety of "agent" reports that detailed the status of each
agent, the firm lacked an integrated, user-friendly, real-time view of
workgroup and historical reporting and trends. This not only constrained
management with limited information on the system, lowered operational
efficiencies and diminished decision-making clarity, but also made it
difficult to proactively resolve problems within the customer service
group.
In an effort to better understand the issues that cause
delays in order flow, daily, systematic reporting by order line, a
real-time status of workgroups in customer service was required.
Transcend United analyzed the entire call flow lifecycle - from incoming call
capture to agent wrap-up time. Over 30 different agents were identified
to be interviewed and questioned on processes, so our team could better
map out a strategy for how the call flow and workflow would be
designed. The Transcend United team modeled the lifecycle process and
inefficient processes were recognized and re-designed concurrently.
Once the entire suite of business processes were
verified, Transcend United managed the deployment of an integrated contact
center and IP Telephony system using a web-based management interface
whereby all supervisors could monitor real-time status of all the
activities within the customer service group. This new reporting
mechanism is instrumental in helping to improve the timely fulfillment
of orders and to prevent "bottlenecked" calls from affecting operations,
supporting the goal of shipping 95% of all orders on or before the
estimated delivery date.
Technologies & Techniques
- IP Telephony
- Contact Center
- Technology Consulting
- Reporting Portal
