With Avaya, CIEE Transforms Its Communication with Its Student Client Base

Strengthening the partnership that is already more than 15-years strong, Avaya has been hired to provide solutions enabling CIEE integrated and streamlined communication with the young people it serves, across various channels. In addition to improving the overall experience, this new structure reduced time to fill job openings, provided more comprehensive customer service, and higher quality calls.

Without a doubt, the world is undergoing a digital transformation. Now imagine how important this is for companies that serve young adults, the majority of whom are digital natives. It was in the face of that reality that the Student-Business Integration Center (CIEE in Portuguese), through its long-established partnership with Avaya, invested in a complete modernization of the service it offers to young adults entering the job market.

As a result of its digital transformation process, CIEE today has a robust, unified, and cloud-based communications platform underpinned by Avaya Breeze and Avaya Oceana. Through these two Avaya solutions, CIEE systems could be integrated and the groundwork for omnichannel (including mobile) service has been established.

“Avaya has been our partner for over 15 years. During that time, we have been able to offer a stable telephone customer service channel. But of course, we have been noticing a growing need to streamline relationship-management with young people between channels, especially digital ones,” says Silvio Soares, Technology and Support Manager at CIEE.

“When we were shown the potential that Avaya Breeze and Avaya Oceana have, we saw the ability to improve our interaction with young people. All our efforts were directed toward implementing this project, which was not only an important milestone for CIEE’s digital transformation, but also a way of delivering satisfying experiences to young people entering the job market,” he adds.

To develop and implement the project, CIEE counted on the support of A5 Solutions, a company which has proven its know-how and expertise through 10 years of working mainly in the customer service sector, and which has a long-lasting partnership with Avaya.

In the first phase of the project, the focus was on restructuring the organization’s voice customer service. To do so, work focused initially on two areas: first, installing the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) for telephone calls -- which has already delivered results, with some 88% of calls handled with no need for an agent to get involved. The second area included the automatic dialer, with the aim of allowing more effectiveness in presenting job opportunities to the students by cross-checking information against CIEE’s database.

“Even though the previous set-up worked well, it did not feature integration with CIEE’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. With Avaya’s cloud platform, both the IVR and the dialer optimized this integration with the sole objective of being more effective in our interactions with the students and consequently delivery a better experience”, explains Marcio Rodrigues, president of Avaya Brazil.

One of the main challenges of the project was to integrate the preferences of both generations — as CIEE connects students with businesses. To overcome this challenge, A5 Solutions, through its consultancy team, drew up user journeys for each of CIEE’s client profiles.

“Here, we have a generation that demands agility and likes to take the reins, choosing the medium through which they like to communicate. We were faced with the challenge of understanding that user journey. With Avaya Breeze, we were able to tie all of communication parts of the user journey together and integrate applications. Avaya Oceana has broadened our omnichannel horizons, incorporating telephony, IVR, dialer and other technologies, and adding to that chat and mobile communication”, says Bension Waksman, sales director at A5 Solutions.

Effective customer service: delivering good experiences in less time

The strengthening of CIEE’s customer service structure has not only improved the overall customer service experience for young people looking for their first job, it also has positively impacted the CIEE’s internal ecosystem. For example, after about two months with the CRM integration up and running, there was an 8-fold increase in the volume of customer service interactions nationwide and a 5-day reduction in the time it takes to fill positions, when benchmarked versus pre-integration metrics.

Meanwhile, the IVR integration allowed CIEE to continue with its digital transformation plan, allowing resources to be applied more efficiently to costs relating to customer service agents, productivity, and student satisfaction. Today, CIEE’s interface is much more intuitive when it comes to analyzing the data generated, generating reports, and understanding the context of calls when customers decide to switch customer service channels.

“The implementation of the new Avaya platform opened vast horizons so that we develop this project even more. Our objective, through the various digital channels, includes delivering a good experience with better management of customer service agents,” says Silvio of CIEE.

Omnichannel consolidation

With the conclusion of the first implementation phase for the new CIEE customer service structure, CIEE, Avaya, and A5 Solutions have already began mapping out the next steps. The next step to be taken, will be making chat service available in the coming months.

There is also planning underway to develop a mobile customer service platform incorporating a visual IVR capabilities to give the consumer more options. This approach includes integrating the telephony audio with visual content, sending the user SMS messages, and leveraging location service resources and document sharing capabilities.

“CIEE has invested on various fronts to deliver satisfying experiences to students who are entering the workforce. We want to make their lives easier when presenting them with opportunities or when signing an internship or trainee contract. Looking for the right opportunity to enter the workforce obviously causes anxiety, so you have to make the process easier using effective communication that satisfies the client,” Silvio concludes.