New Microsoft Case Study Highlights Gold Systems UC Deployment
Gold Systems helps Extend Health increase growth and save costs with Unified Communications
Microsoft has just published a new case study on a Gold Systems customer deployment of a unified communications solution based on Microsoft technologies. Extend Health was experiencing 100 percent annual growth and bumping against the scalability limits of its Cisco-based call center. To eliminate those limits, the company turned to a custom solution based on Microsoft unified communications technologies. The solution immediately scaled to support almost twice as many agents as the Cisco solution and has unlimited ability to scale out. Extend Health can now bring new agents on board in days, instead of weeks or months, and place them where it makes the most business sense-at headquarters, in remote offices, or outsourced locations. The company also was able to design custom workflows that add competitive value to its business. These capabilities came at an initial U.S.$3 million savings over the Cisco solution and will continue to save the company $640,000 each year.
Click here to download the new unified communications case study.
Click here to view the new unified communications case study at Microsoft.com.
Situation
Extend Health is one of the leading providers of defined-contribution benefit programs to corporate America. The company’s service can be complex, requiring significant time on the phone with clients and their employees to explain and implement program options. To provide that phone service, Extend Health maintains a customer service call center, which is absolutely mission-critical to the business.
The call center was run using a Cisco Express Contact Center solution. At the time it was implemented, the choice of Cisco made sense. But Extend Health didn’t count on having such immediate and substantial success. As the company grew, it quickly approached the scalability limits of the Cisco solution. Extend Health was also bumping up against the financial costs of expanding its call center operations. Provisioning and servicing the Cisco hardware and software for each outsourced call center agent was a financial and administrative burden. It was also difficult to customize the Cisco software to reflect the way Extend Health wanted to conduct business. To support the company’s continued growth, Extend Health needed a different call center solution.
Solution
The key business requirement for the new call center solution was that it provide enough scalability and reliability-from both licensing and technology perspectives-to support the company for at least another five years. A close second was the ability to use the solution as a platform upon which to develop customizations that reflect the way the company does business.
Extend Health first looked at upgrading its Cisco solution-until it did the math and realized that the upgrade would cost $3.2 million to license and deploy. After consulting with Gold Systems, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, regarding the overall architecture, Extend Health discovered an alternative: a unified communications solution that includes Internet telephony, interactive voice response (IVR), voice mail, and instant messaging. This proposed solution was based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007, Speech Server 2007 (now part of Office Communications Server), and other Microsoft technologies.
Extend Health conducted a pilot, testing each of the key capabilities of the proposed solution, including some of the custom business logic that Extend Health wanted Speech Server to use in directing calls to call center agents. The basic function of the solution is to receive, route, and maintain voice traffic.
Extend Health developers used the Microsoft .NET Framework and tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite to create business logic that replaces standard call center call-routing software, and an integrated call center/customer relationship management solution that gives agents more complete customer information on a single screen.
Benefits
With Microsoft unified communications, Extend Health now has the capacity to easily support its aggressive annual growth rate for the next five years, has cut the time it takes to bring new call agents on board from months to days, and can easily customize call center applications to deliver exceptional customer service. The company is doing so with an up-front savings of more than $3 million compared to its Cisco call center, and is realizing continued savings of $640,000 per year.
Scales to Support Years of Growth
In contrast to the Cisco solution, which limited Extend Health to 300 call center agents, the Microsoft-based solution will support the company for at least the next five years, even if the company continues its 100 percent annual growth.
Cuts Time to Bring New Employees on Board from Months to Days
Another aspect of scalability is the ability to quickly bring additional staff-especially remote staff-online to meet temporary peaks in business, such as open enrollment periods.
Provides Flexibility to Meet Business Needs
One of the biggest benefits that Extend Health has gained by its adoption of Microsoft technologies is the ability to match its technological processes to its business processes, rather than the other way around.
Saves 96 Percent Over Competitor’s Purchase Price, Plus $640,000 Annually
In contrast to a new Cisco solution, which would have cost $3.2 million, Extend Health implemented the Microsoft solution for $140,000-an extraordinary savings of 96 percent.
Tags: Microsoft, OCS, Office Communications Server, UC, Unified Communications
