Office Depot launches virtual cloud initiative to drive business results
This post was authored by Alex
ander Jaross. Alexander is Senior Manager, Telesales and Contact Centre Europe, at Office Depot.
Office Depot is a global supplier of office products and services, and we continuously look for improvements in our global contact center operations. Our goal is to deliver the best customer experience and generate maximum revenues at the lowest operational cost. At Office Depot BV we want to consolidate our pan-European contact centers into a single unified virtual contact center with uniform contact management that improved the customer experience and optimized workforce productivity. Our objective is to employ “universal” agents that can respond to calls, emails, or chat requests with equal facility. We want to be able to route any call from any country to any agent anywhere in Europe as long as they had the appropriate skills.
We recently launched a ground-breaking “virtual cloud” initiative that brings together the company’s workforce serving Benelux DACH, Spain, Italy, the UK, and Ireland with three layers of virtualization: enterprise IP telephony, virtual contact center, and unified interaction management. The IP telephony layer unifies the communications infrastructure with Cisco call managers, media gateways, and wide area networks. The virtual contact center platform from Transera unifies the distributed workforce with global queuing, routing, and reporting. RightNow Technologies provides the customer interaction management solution unifying the treatment of calls, emails, and chat sessions.
Layers two and three are currently in the transition and testing phase. Once we are into production, Office Depot BV will be running multiple call centers staffed by hundreds of agents across Europe with this three-layered “virtual cloud” solution. The benefits are obvious and tangible: superior customer experience, consistent service delivery, and compelling cost savings. Customers will experience lower wait times because call loads can be shared across multiple call centers. Agents will be more productive because they avoid monotony by varying their workload across calls, emails, and chats. They will also be more effective because they will have automatic access to relevant customer information with every contact. By combining an on-demand virtual contact center with an enterprise IP telephony deployment, Office Depot BV will gain the efficiencies of workforce optimization and unified interaction management and the resulting cost savings.
Virtual contact center clouds drive real results for real companies, including Office Depot.