Global Financial Services Firm Unifies Communications with Single Platform and All-in-One Application Suite

Challenge

Challenge

To migrate from a global infrastructure of acquired multi-vendor, multi-point systems to a single-vendor platform that would be much easier to administer. Specific objectives of the new solution were to:

• Replace proprietary hardware-based communications systems at sites worldwide

• Simplify system management and user provisioning

• Improve quality monitoring and reporting

• Speed response times for inbound interactions

Solution

• Customer Interaction Center® (CIC), a standards-based IP applications suite for multimedia contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony

• Interaction Recorder®, a multimedia recording application pre-integrated to CIC for call, email, fax, web chat and screen recording and scoring in organizations of all types

Benefits

• Reduced overall system support requirements, better utilization of IT resources

• Improved business and customer service processes via rapid application development and deployment

• Consistent quality monitoring and true end-to-end reporting across global sites

• Business user access to CIC’s customizable Microsoft-based voice and data applications

The Challenge

When Computershare expanded its financial services operations via acquisitions in North America and Europe, the company’s offices in Australia, the UK, Canada and the US were forced to use several inherited communications systems that came along with the organizational mergers. The systems, which included PBX phone equipment, voice mail systems, call recorders and interactive voice response (IVR) systems from different vendors, were largely hardware-centric and based on the proprietary architectures of their respective manufacturers. Worse for Computershare’s IT infrastructure was that each system required its own administrative, customization, reporting, and user interfaces.

“By 2000, we had inherited a group of multi-vendor systems – systems that were highly inflexible because of their proprietary architectures,” said Computershare’s Global Investor Phone Manager, Greg Chrisp. “System management became more time-consuming, interoperability between systems was restrictive, and responses for process updates were extremely slow whenever our business requirements changed. We also knew there had to be an alternative to our system administrators overseeing so many different interfaces, and having to set up the same users several times across systems.”

Computershare considered upgrades from its existing mix of vendors and reviewed products from a few new vendors. However, proprietary hardware architectures and multiple interfaces for system and user administration still posed problems.

“What we discovered with some of the ‘single vendor’ solutions we researched was that they were actually a set of loosely integrated products the vendor had acquired through buyouts,” Chrisp said. “So we still would have had to contend with incompatible hardware systems and multiple interfaces, plus several expensive specialty components for integration. Tracking interactions across our operational sites for load balancing and end-to-end reporting also would have been difficult, if not impossible.”

The Solution

After final vendor evaluations, Computershare chose a true single-platform, single-vendor solution in the Customer Interaction Center (CIC) from Interactive Intelligence. CIC is developed on a standards-based software platform and offers multimedia capability for contact center agents as well as business users and the mobile workforce via a fully pre-integrated application suite. Among its many contact center and enterprise IP telephony features are IP PBX call functionality, ACD, multimedia queuing, skills-based and priority routing, IVR, auto attendant, conferencing, real-time quality monitoring, on-demand call recording, web services, self-service automation and remote access.

Pre-integrated add-on applications for CIC make it easy to add features as needed, such as multimedia recording and screen recording, predictive dialing, workforce management, multi-site routing and more. And no matter the number of users or range of features, CIC’s all-in-one architecture centralizes administration down to a single interface.

“With CIC, we saw a flexible and cost-effective growth path in that we could simply plug together modules for new services – no forklift upgrades or costly integration projects were needed,” Chrisp said. “More importantly to us was that the CIC software runs on a standards-based platform, which allows us to treat voice in the same manner as data. A perfect example is that CIC’s recording module lets us store recordings as .WAV files on an off-the-shelf server, instead of requiring dedicated, proprietary servers that are far more costly.”

Another objective for Computershare was an ability to incorporate new Internet Protocol (IP) technologies such as voice over IP (VoIP) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) communications standard that supports networked voice and data communications. According to Chrisp, Interactive Intelligence and CIC easily met the firm’s IP objective, having originally built its platform on open standards in 1994, and then architecting it on the SIP standard throughout in 2002.

Since most of Computershare’s acquisitions were occurring in the US, the company decided to deploy CIC there first, along with the Interaction Recorder® add-on module for advanced multimedia recording, scoring and logging. CIC’s single platform approach allowed Computershare to then quickly deploy the system in Canada, the UK and Australia, mindful of any support issues that could arise from maintaining disparate systems during the roll-out process.

“Before we deployed CIC we knew the scale of our multi-systems problem and the ramifications worldwide,” Chrisp said. “Our intent therefore was to standardize globally as quickly as possible.”

Today, Computershare uses a combination of CIC’s traditional Time Division Multiplex (TDM) and SIP versions for switching to support 3,000 business users and contact center agents at offices throughout Australia, Canada, the UK and US The company also installed Interaction Recorder to support many of its global sites.

The Benefits

Since installing CIC, Computershare has increased operational efficiencies and generated much faster customer response times.

“Because of its single administrative interface, CIC requires far less manpower to support it than do multi-point systems,” said Computershare’s Voice Technology Manager for North America, Richard Fahey. “Another benefit of CIC is that we’re able to use our existing IT support teams, instead of having to employ a dedicated telephony team.”

Computershare also reports that the company is able to adapt more quickly to changing business requirements, especially those of a global operation. “CIC’s built-in customization tools and consolidated architecture let us create business rules once, and then apply them across our locations for faster roll-out and greater consistency,” Fahey said. “We also have more consistent, and truly accurate, reporting from end to end because, unlike the standalone systems we replaced, CIC doesn’t require third-party integrations to marry up the data in our reporting structure.”

Computershare’s executives and mobile workers have especially benefited from the CIC system’s ease-of use and remote flexibility. “Our high-end users love the fact they can configure their own system parameters for functions like follow-me/find-me and ring tones,” Fahey added. “CIC’s desktop call controls and client integrations with Microsoft applications has made the telephony learning curve much shorter for end-users, as well, since the majority of them already know how to navigate through a Windows environment, versus having to learn more touchtone key pad sequences.”

Overall, Computershare attributes a newfound competitive advantage to CIC’s practical all-in-one design and converged applications architecture. As Global Investor Phone Manager Greg Chrisp concludes regarding the CIC solution: “We’ve been able to differentiate our services and help more customers address their problems more quickly with what we consider to be a truly innovative solution.”

About Interactive Intelligence

Interactive Intelligence (Nasdaq: ININ, www.inin.com) is a global provider of unified business communications solutions for contact center automation, enterprise IP telephony, and enterprise messaging. The company’s innovative all-in-one solutions, which are now used by more than 3,000 organizations worldwide, are built on a standards-based software suite developed to manage multi-channel voice and data communications, and to eliminate the complexity of multi-point systems from traditional legacy vendors. Interactive Intelligence was founded in 1994 and continues to offer maximum value both with premise-based and hosted solution offerings, which include software as well as hardware, implementation consulting, support and education. At Interactive Intelligence, it’s what we do.

About Computershare

Computershare (ASX: CPU, www.computershare.com) is a global leader in share registration/transfer agency, employee equity plans, proxy solicitation and other specialized financial and communication services. Many of the world’s largest companies employ Computershare’s innovative solutions to maximize the value of their own relationships with investors, employees, customers and members. Computershare employs 10,000 finance professionals and serves 14,000 corporations and 90 million shareholders and employee accounts in 21 countries. Computershare was founded in Australia in 1978 with offices in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Channel Islands, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, the US, Germany, Hong Kong and Australia.

Quick Tip: Follow an all-in-one path to unify communications

The unified communications offerings from proprietary vendors are typically a collection of loosely integrated “multi-box” hardware and software products, which work counter to the open approach of VoIP and industry standards such as SIP that promote the choice of standard servers, phone devices, gateways, etc.

Therefore, the best path to unified communications is one designed on:

• A tightly integrated, centrally managed VoIP architecture

• A single network for converged voice and data

• All-in-one applications layered on the network, e.g., IP PBX, business applications, and enhanced messaging (voice mail and fax in the email inbox, find-me/follow-me, presence management, etc.)

• Business process automation to support work flows organization-wide for any item, not just inbound calls or customer interactions

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