21st Century Contact Center Serves the Public and Improves Customer Satisfaction by 50 Percent for Dubai Roads And Transport Authority (RTA)

How a 21st Century Contact Center Serves the Public and Improves Customer Satisfaction by 50 Percent

The Dubai RTA is tasked with planning and overseeing the roads, rail and marine transportation networks in the Emirate of Dubai and between Dubai and other Emirates of the UAE and neighboring countries. Its mission is to provide an effective, safe and integrated transportation system, and its wide-ranging responsibilities include buses, taxis, tolls, road and rail engineering, traffic safety, marine transportation, and registration and licensing.

Challenges

By most measures, Dubai is the fastest-growing city in the world. The London Guardian recently reported that an amazing U.S. $100 billion worth of projects were either already underway or planned for the near future.

Naturally, such unprecedented growth strained the existing infrastructure, particularly Dubai’s transportation system. Moving a rapidly-growing number of workers, residents and tourists around is the responsibility of the Roads and Transit Authority (RTA). And a big part of that responsibility is providing accurate, timely information.

Most of that information is provided via telephone. “Everybody in Dubai knows the phone number 800-9090,” says Mrs. Aysha Saad Al Busmait, Director of the RTA Customer Service Centers Department. The number is advertised throughout the city to remind people of their single point of contact for all questions regarding public transportation.

Travelers rely on the 800-9090 number to inquire about taxi service (both on land and water), choose a bus route, check traffic conditions or report problems. Previously, all of these calls — approximately 20,000 per week — would go to agents in a call center. In 2007, RTA management realized that their existing outsourced call center could not successfully handle the large and steadily growing volume of calls.

“We needed to provide something better — a modern, in-house contact center, not just a call center,” says Mr. Yousef Jawad, CEO of Services for RTA. “We also needed a reliable partner to help us implement that new and better solution.”
The success of the project would be measured directly by improved customer satisfaction (“CSAT”). And when the customer is the entire traveling public of the world’s fastest-growing city, this is a demanding commitment to make.

Solution

When Dubai RTA opened their contact center project to competitive bidding, the field was representative of the industry’s most recognized names. However, in all but one case the leading IP contact center vendors were wrapped inside a consortium of partners.

The exception was Avaya. Under the terms of its proposal, Avaya would take full responsibility for delivering a contact center that would address the CSAT challenges quickly and ensure service excellence in the long term as well.

“What Avaya offered us was a real turnkey solution,” says Mr. Yousef Jawad. “They handled everything from the initial consultancy to the deployment of the contact center, including the hiring, training and assisting in agent management.”

RTA had previously put trust in Avaya, as the Authority’s preferred LAN vendor. RTA’s existing network is based on Avaya Ethernet Routing Switches, including the ERS 8600 and ERS 5520.

“We had great confidence in their technology and the services they offered,” says Mr. Abdullah Al Bastaki, IT Director at RTA.

Once the contract was awarded, Avaya began working on a very aggressive schedule.

High-level officials had made a very public commitment that would require the contact center to be functional and staffed in five months and ready to meet service level agreements (SLAs) two months after that.

First engagement: Avaya Consulting Services

Avaya Professional Service Consultants were involved in early discussions with the customer to understand RTA’s current and future requirements, and then presented a comprehensive plan to the RTA management team. As part of the customer’s strategic development, and in particular its customer service department, Avaya consultants advised RTA to build a new Contact Center with world-class capabilities to manage multi-channel interactions for consolidated services across the organization. The Managed Consolidated Contact Centre Solution (M3CS) project was the realization of this strategy.

The project was driven by the following objectives, which were defined in partnership with RTA’s customer service department:

• Improve the customer experience: As its first step, the customer service department aimed to deliver the best possible interaction experience to transport customers, both residents and visitors in Dubai. This also aligned with RTA’s Customer Resource Management strategy.
• Consolidation: As the team realized, a dramatic improvement in the customer experience could only be achieved through a concerted approach to interaction and service delivery. In order to do so, channels and mediums needed to be consolidated into RTA’s first, best-in-class contact center to host multi-channel interactions.
• Integration: This consolidation entailed close integration of the various operations across RTA — from within the customer service department to its partners to the agencies and departments that provide supporting services.
• Cost reduction: The customer service department believed that this improvement could be achieved while also reducing costs of transactions and operations.
• Technology leverage: The team decided to leverage recent technological advances in communication convergence and unification, voice, speech, self service and the Internet reach this desired end state.

The plan also outlined the several key deliverables and responsibilities of the Avaya Professional Services Consulting team:

• Discover and define RTA’s service business requirements

• Define the elements of a technology approach that would meet these requirements

• Analyze and define the customer “touch points”
• Design and develop all operational and managerial requirements, including processes, KPIs, service and performance targets, HR management and procedures, management recruitment and selection, and a quality monitoring model
• Develop and implement a training curriculum for agents and management — not just technology training, but soft-skills training and knowledge-base integration
• Define the qualifications for agent and supervisor roles and candidate profiles
• Establish the business model and the long-term strategy beyond M3CS
• In addition, Avaya provided an end-to-end service solution — from planning and design through execution and management — to deploy, operate and optimize RTA’s contact center solution.

Setting up the contact center infrastructure

In the implementation phase, the Avaya Professional Services Consulting team, in coordination with the RTA projects and logistics department, began to prepare the M3CS facility as well as the voice infrastructure. This infrastructure was based on a Avaya Communication Server 1000 IP PBX with high-availability architecture through redundant call processors.

Efficient skills-based call routing, incorporation of multimedia — including email, web and fax — and tight integration with the RTA data network was achieved through deployment of Avaya’s Contact Center solution.

A self-service option for customers was enabled by inclusion of the Avaya Media Processing Server 500, a full-featured IVR solution providing Advanced Speech solutions, VoiceXML and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

More than technology: managing the contact center

The Avaya team of experts handled more than just the technology. In association with the RTA projects and logistics teams, Avaya was responsible for provisioning the contact center facility setup.

Avaya also coordinated the IT and telecoms requirements, addressing all aspects of the contact center — strategy, process, technology, people and facilities.

Results

• M3CS completed and “live” on schedule as promised, the contact center began delivering services for RTA as scheduled in the fourth quarter of 2008. The first call was received only 16 weeks after RTA awarded the contract to Avaya.

• Customer satisfaction improved by 50 percent measured by improvement in customer satisfaction — RTA’s most important metric going into the project — M3CS has been highly successful. Surveys indicate that customer satisfaction has improved from a 60 percent CSAT to better than 90 percent CSAT. RTA has no doubt that their Avaya solution has been key to the success of this drastic increase. “Our contact center is critical to our overall customer strategy,” said Mr. Yousef Jawad. “Avaya helped us achieve our CSAT goals, and now customers tell us that they are extremely satisfied with our service.”

• Abandoned call rate of <1 percent one of the benefits of the Avaya Contact Center solution is a wealth of statistics and reports. Based on the most recent figures available, M3CS handles impressive call volumes smoothly and efficiently.

  The 120-agent round-the-clock contact center handles approximately 82,000 calls per month (not including calls handled by the IVR).

  “Another very important measurement to us is the abandoned-call rate,” says Mr. Yousef Jawad. “And today that has gone to virtually zero.”

  The industry average for a contact center is for 80 percent of calls to be answered within 20 seconds. For M3CS, the performance for this <20-seconds metric averages 95.3 percent. (March 2009)

• Technology that is poised for future growth the Avaya solutions already in place can scale to support 3,350 agents, significantly larger than the current 120-agent contact center.

  “RTA is now the proud owner of a very sophisticated, very effective contact center,” says Mrs. Aysha Saad Al Busmait. “Because of the successful implementation and management of the M3CS, we are actively looking at moving other functions in Dubai over to this facility.”