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.
LiquidSpoke 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 LiquidSpoke 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.
LiquidSpoke 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 LiquidSpoke 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, LiquidSpoke 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 LiquidSpoke 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.
LiquidSpoke 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 LiquidSpoke to implement a fully integrated contact center, IP telephony platform and call recorder. LiquidSpoke 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. LiquidSpoke 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 LiquidSpoke team modeled the lifecycle process and inefficient processes were recognized and re-designed concurrently.
Once the entire suite of business processes were verified, LiquidSpoke 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
