Transcosmos (formerly Merlin Information Systems)

Transcription

1 Transcosmos (formerly Merlin Information Systems) Customer Testimonial v1.00

2 Merlin Information Systems Introduction Merlin Information Systems was founded in 1991, in a world dominated by PC manufacturers and hardware dealers they realised the opportunity to become one of the very first IT companies focused purely on support. That confidence was built on a passion for customer service and experience in an industry that they believed was technology led. From these early beginnings they have built a global IT and customer support organisation with operational centres around the world, and site support across Europe, Asia, North America, and, soon, Latin America. Merlin helps many of the world s largest companies simplify their support processes, reduce cost and increase customer satisfaction the outsourcing and augmentation of their support in complex, highly regulated, international and multi-lingual markets. John Mears, Merlin s CEO said: Just four of us started the business and now we have grown to around 600 people worldwide. We were very much a UK based organisation but now we have locations around the world primarily in the UK, Hungary, the Philippines and the US. Our strategy has always been about having great people working for us with a can do attitude to delivering customer service. People are our product and for us it s all about having the right people delivering the right service and having the best technology in place to enable and facilitate the delivery of those services. Merlin s worldwide operation supports over 2 million end users and consumers in over 120 countries providing IT Service Desk, Customer Support, and Infrastructure Support to their customers. Challenges Merlin had 3 existing Nortel/Avaya CS1K telephony systems, which were running R6 software with 3 separate CC7 Contact Centre platforms across sites in Debrecen, Budapest and Manila, which also supported agents in the UK. These solutions were all standalone but remote users were connected via the existing Global MPLS network to enable blended shore services and provide a certain level of flexibility. The existing solution meant that Merlin had large volumes of in country telephone numbers, crudely implemented networked contact centres and complex DR processes with limited capability. The solutions were also difficult to integrate and difficult to maintain with limited reporting capability and were basically unfit for purpose. With the support ending for Nortel solutions Merlin needed to look for an agile and flexible partner who could work with them to find a solution that offered: A centralised administration function Improved resilience A foundation for future development More features Back office integration Unified Communications 2million End users 120 Countries worldwide 2

3 Aaron Dutch, Merlin s Director of Service said: My key responsibilities are the design of the service that we provide to our customers and key to that is the technology on which we deliver those services. As a business we have grown rapidly, and although growth itself is not a problem it was a challenge to us in respect to the telephony infrastructure. We had new services coming on board and our old system was becoming obsolete. Our old systems were disparate and although they were linked things like reporting was handled in a fragmented manner. Our new solution is based around a single London core with survivable gateways in all of our locations. Another requirement for the business is to enable our people to become more mobile, from both a back office and contact centre agent perspective. Merlin Information Systems engaged with 4net after attending one of their Workplace 3.0 events. They felt that with 4net they had a partner who had the flexible innovative approach they needed to deliver a communications solution that would support their business both now and in the future. Solution 4net proposed to upgrade the CS1K and the Contact Centre systems to the Avaya Aura suite of solutions, with a London core, to provide a single, converged infrastructure across all locations allowing flexible call routing and skill allocation. This solution supports 500 agents across the estate including 62 mobile workers and has provided Merlin with a solid foundation for future feature developments. By upgrading to Avaya Aura, Merlin was able to take advantage of Avaya upgrade promotion pricing rather than buying new licenses. The solution design would give Merlin the ability to re-route Contact Centre calls between locations in the event of a DR situation. It also enabled them to deliver resilient agent recording with quality management, encryption along with applications to assist with PCI compliance. Aaron continues : The Aura solution and the design that we came up with 4net, has enabled us to be more mobile from a back-office perspective, which means that management and other business functions can work remotely. They can work on the go and able to take calls wherever they may be, from any device. Our agents can now work from multiple locations which is a big advantage from a D.R perspective. 4net s design was based on a redundant virtualised solution installed within Merlin s VMWare infrastructure. This allows the migration to be completed easily with a minimum of fuss and downtime and in a controlled timescale as determined by the business. A Media Gateway was installed at each site to provide local DSP resources and connectivity. For additional resiliency, a Local Survivable Processor (LSP) was proposed on both Debrecen and Manila locations. The LSP provides a backup to the centralised solution and will continue to provide service to the office. A full set of programming information is contained within the LSP enabling the solution to continue as before with skilled agents, routing and announcements. Matt Clark, Merlin s Chief Services Officer, responsible for the delivery of all Merlin s services to their customers said We realised at a very early 500 Agents 62 Remote workers 3

4 stage how technology could help us to deliver our services to our customers. The new solution has allowed us to bring in multimedia interactions, the ability to give the user the choice of how they contact us, which is very important to them. Benefits Our customers have big expectations around the quality of service we provide and our business has grown into areas where regulatory compliance is very important, specifically in markets such as finance and healthcare. We spend a lot of time and effort in quality assurance and have a dedicated team who are excited about the functionality we can get from Avaya s quality and workforce management tools. Things like being able to monitor what people are doing on the screen as well as listening to a call, being able to give feedback attached to that screen recording and push it back through the e-learning tool is a huge opportunity for us, which will help us to develop our services and agents even more effectively than we do today. There are a number of other benefits the new system brings. Unified Communications is a major benefit to the back office, equally from an agent perspective, we are able to unify the channels through which our customers interact that being web chate, and voice all under one system. Technology innovations are a key part of what we ve done and we have always tried to push the boundaries when it comes to offering technologies to our customers. With 4net s help, Merlin has built a solution that provides those fundamental and essential requirements of high levels of availability, quality and reslience and that also gives us opetions that future proof our solution to ensure htat we meet the changing needs of our clients and their customer now and in the future. 4

5 The total solution comprised: Merlin UK Datacentre Duplicated Communication Manager - Utilising Merlin virtualization Duplicated Session Manager - Utilising Merlin virtualization ystem Manager - Utilising Merlin virtualization AE Services - Utilising Merlin virtualization CMS Reporting Server - Utilising Merlin virtualization Avaya Aura Messaging - Utilising Merlin virtualization G450 Media Gateway SIP Services Master Contact Recorder - Utilising Merlin servers Merlin Virtualised Environment System Manager Duplicated Session Manager AES Server Duplicated Communication Manager CMS Server Aura Messaging Milton Keynes Master Recorder Quality Server G450 5

6 Hungary Philippines Duplicated G450 Media Gateways (resiliency + recording resource) Survivable S8300D Server (for resiliency) SIP Trunking (signaling passed to Session Managers in UK) ISDN Breakout Slave Contact Recorder (for local recordings saves bandwidth) Utilising Merlin servers Duplicated G450 Media Gateways (resiliency + recording resource) Survivable S8300D Server (for resiliency) SIP Trunking (signaling passed to Session) Debrecen Manilla Slave recorder SIP Slave recorder SIP 6

7 Merlin Virtualised Environment Debrecen System Manager Duplicated Session Manager AES Server Slave recorder SIP Duplicated Communication Manager CMS Server Manilla Aura Messaging Master Recorder Milton Keynes Quality Server Slave recorder SIP G450 Merlin continue to deliver service excellence by adding applications to the solution to improve efficiency and productivity Including: Multichannel contact CTI Integration Workforce Management Agents anywhere Strong UC capabilities Gold standard technology 7

8 4net s powerful combination of service excellence and technical expertise makes us the partner of choice for organisations who want to transform the way they communicate with customers, staff and stakeholders, reduce costs and gain competitive advantage. Our contact centre, unified communications, managed services and telephony solutions are designed to address today s complex business challenges, helping you to respond to your customer and staff requirements. From simple IP Telephony Solutions to Virtual Contact Centres, from Unified Communications to Cloud Services, we partner with best in class vendors such as Avaya, Microsoft and Enghouse, to deliver a solutions portfolio that will address today s changing workplace and build tomorrow s future, making 4net the preferred communications partner for many businesses across the globe. 4net Technologies Ltd, 3 Scholar Green Road, Cobra Court, Manchester M32 0TR +44 (0)