Global BPO C3i Solutions brings the latest innovations to the table

Winning Customer Engagement with Innovation

On any given day, contact center agents at C3i Solutions may field inquiries regarding sports drinks, tires, or pharmaceuticals, just to name a few. With more than 150 diverse clients, many among the FORTUNE 500, the leading business process outsourcing (BPO) company supports over 35 million omnichannel interactions each year in 175 countries via the customer’s channel of choice.

That means customizing offerings for the needs of each client across two verticals: consumer product goods and life sciences. Meeting each client in the context of the markets they serve has always been a key ingredient of C3i Solution’s market leadership.

In an environment driven by a continuous improvement philosophy, C3i Solutions began exploring the market for new contact center innovations. At the same time, the company wanted to replace the six disparate voice and contact center solutions collected through a growth strategy that included acquisitions. The complex backend environment required substantial investments in resources, training and redundant cost supports across the enterprise.

“Consumers expect to engage wherever, whenever, and however they prefer,” said Michael Dean, CTO. “We partnered with Avaya for the experience and flexibility to drive innovation and deliver customized contact center solutions to our clients and their customers.”

Moving to a Single, Global Solution

In the search for a new communication and contact center solution, flexibility was goal #1. Every C3i Solutions client has unique requirements and responding creatively to new RFPs is challenging. Just as critical, the solution had to support C3i Solutions demanding compliance and documentation requirements in a complex matrix of client, industry and governmental regulation.

After a thorough review, C3i Solutions chose Avaya for its flexible, integrated solution set, and the ability to add a number of channels and innovations to the company’s menu of services that now include Mobile IVR, Mobile Video and Co-Browsing to name a few.

“The expectations of our clients and their end customers are changing, and we are excited to offer them a way to see a roadmap to their evolving needs,” said Michael Baker, VP of Telephony. “Our goal was to consolidate all our varied solutions in one place with one provider, and move to one resource pool of technology specialists.”

“The combination of Avaya Oceana™ and Avaya Breeze™ affords us the platform to remain a market leader in offering innovative, robust, and reliable solutions—and do so more quickly than ever,” he added.

As C3i Solutions replaces legacy systems in phases, the IT team and agents are trained on a single platform with the added benefit of enhanced agent flexibility and the speedy migration of best practices across the contact centers and clients—a real differentiator.

Accelerating Deployment

Prior to deployment, the Avaya Professional Services team partnered with C3i Solutions with three primary goals in mind—learn more about their unique needs, understand how to complement their robust services offerings and ease the multi-year rollout across their clients. They outlined designs on how best to configure the system and integrated voice response (IVR) flows. They also co-planned customizations and created roadmaps to guide every stage of deployment.

“Avaya Professional Services has real value,” Baker said. “We collaborated to map the data flows and walked through the A-to-Z dev process. It really helped with discovery.”

For Baker, quick rollout with Avaya Pod Fx™ , Avaya’s turnkey solution for private, public, or hybrid cloud environments, delivered a major bonus by freeing his team from getting bogged down in creating the new infrastructure. Pod Fx enabled them to pre-stage—and accelerate—the deployment.

Rolling Out a ‘Dozen Innovations’

As C3i Solutions rolls out its new Avaya solutions, the IT team appreciates all the flexibility Avaya OceanaTM and Avaya BreezeTM provide. Breeze empowers in-house developers to build snap-ins to Oceana quickly without relying on outside help. Responding quickly to their clients’ ever changing business is a key value add.

With Oceana, C3i gained more intelligent routing to get callers to the right person or right geography based on the caller’s location. Agents are distributed across 10 global sites.

Avaya also expanded the company’s multi-channel offerings. It can easily leverage the channel preferences of their client’s consumers or patients—for some that might mean legacy phone. For others, SMS, chat, and social media.

As for compliance, automated technologies enhance the safeguards that C3i Solutions has in place for customer information.

Co-browsing, and chat bots are the Hot List of capabilities next on C3i Solutions’ strategic roadmap. With co-browsing, reps and customers can jointly view an application in real-time, online. Currently, C3i Solutions is testing chat bot technology with an eye towards the future.

“We’re tracking a dozen innovations that we’re looking to roll out,” Baker said. “Those emerging technologies will contribute significantly to our competitive advantage with every client service opportunity.”

Driving Efficiency for IT, Agents

In consolidating with Avaya, C3i Solutions anticipates a number
of advantages:

• Competitive advantage – The latest innovations to meet clients’ current and aspirational needs

• Quicker learning curve – One solution for the IT team and 3,200 agents to learn

• Manpower efficiency – No need for separate experts and training across multiple solutions

• Agent mobility – Greater ease in shifting agents between clients as needed

• Self-sufficiency – Customizations without the need to tap outside resources

• Less rack space – Consolidation in moving from six solutions to one

• Regulatory compliance – HIPAA, GDPR, EHNAC, PCI, and more

• Scalability – The ability to handle a growing client load and changing market needs

Baker says the response from clients has exceeded expectations. “I didn’t anticipate how excited customers would be about the Avaya platform and what we could do with it,” Baker said. “They’re choosing the top innovations like Mobile IVR that they want to deploy. They even want to put their agents on it for lines of business we don’t support. It’s been a
very exciting development.”