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Cincinnati Bell Manages 50% Increase in Traffic With Scalable, Reliable Avaya Cloud Platform
Cincinnati bell manages 50% increase in traffic with scalable, reliable Avaya cloud platform
Founded in 1873, Cincinnati Bell has been around as long as the telephone itself. Always innovating, the company adopted Avaya’s Experience Platform to quickly deploy remote agents, handle double the call volume, manage business acquisitions, and serve their increased new customer base created by stay-at-home orders.
remote agents
customers served
employees
Challenge
- Manage 50% call volume increase created by global pandemic
- Integrate acquired business
- Safeguard health of contact center employees by enabling them to work remotely during the COVID-19 crisis
- Gain insight into overall customer experience
Value Created
- Deployment of stable, reliable CCaaS platform that was implemented quickly and cost-effectively
- 290 contact center employees safely working remotely
- Implementation of a single platform across business units
- Staffing levels normalized in three weeks
- End-to-end management of the customer experience creating better service and cost savings
“Our call volume increased by more than 50 percent, compounding our staffing issues. We were in a situation of "figure it out, and figure it out yesterday.”
VP of Contact Center Operations for Cincinnati Bell, Inc.
Navigating a Crisis
Ohio’s stay-at-home order caused a surge in subscribers seeking help to connect at home—whether for work, school, or entertainment. A Cincinnati Bell survey conducted during this period revealed that a surprising 35 percent of new residential internet customers didn’t have a service provider prior to the pandemic. On the business side, Cincinnati Bell saw increased demand for bandwidth upgrades.
“We have great relationships with Avaya and our partner STARTEK, and we said ‘this is the time where we need you,’” recounts Neises. “The teams from both companies came together with us, and we were able to very quickly roll out a solution.”
Within two days of the issuance of Ohio’s stay-at-home order, Neises and her team enabled more than 100 employees to work remotely. They continued moving forward at breakneck speed to transition the rest of the contact center workforce and restore their hours of operation to pre- pandemic levels. Within three weeks, 290 contact center employees were safely working remotely, allowing Cincinnati Bell’s call center to meet increased demand for support and services.
Neises evaluated competitive solutions, but ultimately, her past positive experience with Avaya made the decision easy.
“We hadn’t implemented a work-at-home solution for our contact centers,” explains Neises. “From a business continuity perspective, we felt confident in geographic diversity. Unfortunately, that doesn’t prepare you for a global pandemic.”
Neises’ credits her team with driving their focus on both customers, and each other.“Our job is to be there for our customers—answer their calls, resolve their issues, and try to do what’s right by them,” she says. “The folks on my team worked 18-hour days. They willingly shifted from one function on Monday to something different on Tuesday based on the needs of the business. There are certainly many takeaways from this situation, however, one is clear: in times of difficulty, our employees care about one another and our customers.”
Moving to the Cloud
In the months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Neises and her team were in the process of upgrading their aging telephony infrastructure. Working closely with Avaya, they rolled out a robust, multi-experience platform that will provide a 360-degree view of customer interactions and enable channels based on customers’ preferred mediums. “We were very siloed. We had disparate systems and solutions for customer touchpoints across the organization,” recalls Neises. “This prohibited us from collecting and understanding, holistically, our customer interactions. That inconsistency across channels was resulting in frustrated customers.” When the pandemic hit, Neises and her team decided to adopt Avaya Experience Platform, a public cloud CCaaS solution that will not only improve CX, but ultimately save money for the company. “We looked at other vendors but made the decision to go the Avaya route because I knew I was getting a stable, reliable, robust, and scalable platform,” she explains.
As well as providing a highly available, capable, and flexible solution in a time of crisis, the company also recognized that moving from a premises-based system to a fully cloud-based platform would position it to consolidate across geographies following its 2018 acquisition of Hawaii Telecom.
“With a single platform, it ensures consistent reporting, monitoring, and management of our customer interactions, as well as our front-line support personnel,” says Neises.
“It allows me to drive incremental improvements in first contact resolution,” she says. “Not only does this provide a better customer experience, it will ultimately save money for the company.”
“We looked at other vendors but made the decision to go the Avaya route because I knew I was getting a stable, reliable, robust, and scalable platform.”
— Christina Neises VP of Contact Center Operations for Cincinnati Bell, Inc.
A Solution That Grows With You
Cincinnati Bell’s long-term strategy is to continue to build and scale, which means more subscribers and more calls coming into the contact center.
“I knew the platform was something that I could leverage as we added more subscribers,” Neises says. “The additional agents I’ll need will be fully supported on this platform. It will allow Cincinnati Bell to grow well into the future.”
Avaya Experience Platform enables customers to innovate at their own pace, building on a CX platform with unprecedented global adoption and reliability, and preparing them for business transformation without risking disruption to existing services.
“With a single platform, we will be able to ensure consistent reporting, monitoring, and management of our customer interactions, as well as our front-line support personnel”
— Christina Neises VP of Contact Center Operations for Cincinnati Bell, Inc.
About Cincinnati Bell
About Cincinnati Bell, Inc. Cincinnati Bell, Inc. has headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati Bell delivers integrated communications solutions to residential and business customers over its fiber-optic and copper networks including high-speed internet, video, voice and data. The Company provides service in areas of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Hawaii. In addition, enterprise customers across the United States and Canada rely on CBTS and OnX, wholly owned subsidiaries, for efficient, scalable office communications systems and end-to-end IT solutions.
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