Case Study: Sitel Group

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

It was a first for Sitel when a major global insurance company issued the challenge to build a brand new omnichannel contact center solution from the ground up, technology included.

“Our client was split into company A and company B, and company A got control of the existing contact center technology,” says Chip Heineman, VP-Global IT Solutions. “So company B needed to find its own contact center solution — in less than four months. They came to us, and we turned to NICE CXone. Our proposal launched a new partnership with NICE CXone.”

Time was tight, and a smooth transition from the legacy architecture was crucial. Chip says that besides the short turnaround, a multitude of specific requirements needed to be met for the ambitious project.

“The solution needed to be deployed to multiple BPOs and have the capability to support four separate seasonal peaks in addition to being operational in less than four months,” he explains. “The new cloud solution would replace an old premise-based system and needed to incorporate a wide range of products from workforce management to self-service/speech recognition IVR to comprehensive reporting.”

THE SOLUTION

A working partnership with NICE CXone was established for this huge undertaking. Within months, a one-of-a-kind, fully managed contact center solution was developed for the client. The Sitel Omniplatform Solution and Sitel’s fully managed NICE CXone Solution were launched from a collaborative, multifaceted process.

“Sitel’s team worked closely with NICE CXone’s project management and technical teams,” Chip says. “Together, they developed a solution that used both companies’ resources to gather the business requirements, do the training and implementation and provide ongoing support going forward.”

The new omnichannel solution on the NICE CXone cloud CX platform replaced the client’s 20-year-old build on the Genesys solution, as well as all of its previous contact center tools. The new implementation included two self-service IVRs, four CRM integrations and more than 1,300 automatic speech recognition (ASR) menus. At peak, the scope encompasses:

• 2,400+ agents
• 1,300 concurrent platform users
• 850+ toll-free numbers
• 400+ inbound DID numbers
• Four different vendors
• 17 different sites

To meet insurance industry requirements for agent-customer interactions, the platform treats all sites and partners as one enterprise, eliminating external transfers between agents with different capabilities. Omnichannel routing of voice, chat and email on one unified platform delivers the flexibility to ramp up with limited costs.

Not only did the project parameters extend beyond typical processes, the project timeline itself defied industry standards.

“We were able to meet this aggressive timeline in partnership with NICE CXone,” says Chip. “We obviously didn’t have trained up resources for something like this. So, when the Sitel-NICE CXone process began in February 2018, our team rode along with NICE CXone’s team to help gather resources and learn. Then in March, we started actually doing training of our internal teams to get them up to speed on using Studio, on doing CXone Quality Management and understanding NICE CXone’s CXone Workforce Management.”

The first call was launched in July 2018, with full implementation of the Phase I and II requirements completed by the end of September 2018 to meet Sitel’s client’s seasonal ramp. SMS is a future request for this client and is in the plan.

Chip says that Sitel’s client has been effusive in its praise of the collective team, calling it “… by far the smoothest and most comprehensive migration in this company’s history.”

The partnership continues — and flourishes

The Sitel-NICE CXone collaboration launched more than an impressive installation for a single client. Already the company is seeing great interest in the new fully-managed NICE CXone omnichannel cloud solution. And as the partnership continues, Sitel has expanded to reselling NICE CXone technology to its new customers.

The partnership between the two companies has produced additional ripple effects. Sitel also plans to move more than 4,000 existing Avaya agents onto the CXone platform over the next several years. As this occurs, CXone will replace Avaya as the company’s de-facto standard for its CX technology.