Teaching you how it is done

With no branch network to service its members, the Victorian Teachers Credit Union (VTCU) lives or dies by the quality of its electronic transaction systems and, of course, its contact centre, which is the main human interface between the organisation and those it serves. The VTCU has just three locations in Camberwell, Hawthorn and Moonee Ponds, more than 200 staff and more than $800 million in assets. It prides itself on a main point of differentiation; to provide superior service. Ninety-six percent of transactions are electronic.

That’s probably why after a strategic review of the organisation’s future needs, the credit union, which was named 2007 ‘Credit Union of the Year’, recognised the need to modernise its network infrastructure and deploy IP telephony throughout. A move which it recognised would help it deliver outstanding customer service, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its staff and improve compliance and reporting.

According to Rosemary Boissezon, the VTCU’s executive manager, sales and service, the organisation had three different systems in its three sites. These aging systems failed to help when it came to meeting the its objective. They were not able to provide the business continuity the credit
union required; nor could they facilitate the transfer of overflow calls between contact centres or the ability for
call recording.

Adam Alsbury, executive manager, strategy and marketing said: “The biggest problem was that the very old systems we had in place didn’t provide any of the functionality that we knew was out there. There was no skills-based routing, no call recording, no workforce management. All it provided was basically just a phone on a desk.”

“There was no reporting, we could get no information via increment, we had to wait until the next day,” said Paul Wallis, manager, member contact centre.

Meanwhile, Mark Thomson, executive manager, technology had been arguing, just as his predecessor had done, for a revamp of the VTCU network backbone which ran between the three sites.

The development of a five-year strategic vision for the organisation acknowledged that investing in infrastructure and technology would assist the credit union to use technology to free staff from mundane work procedures. So a three-phase plan evolved which began with a new corporate backbone and culminated in CTI integration with the phone system and a new CRM system to provide enhanced services to the VTCU’s 77,000 members.

“One of the things that was clear early on was that we needed to approach the project in distinct phases,” said Thomson. “The way we wanted it to evolve was to first redesign our network backbone, then implement an IP telephony system. Then finally deploy computer telephony integration.

“This was intentionally to suit the size of company and to spread the cost. We are a small to medium organisation and we didn’t want to bite too much off at once,” he said.

The first two phases are complete. The VTCU has a new backbone, new phone system and a CRM solution integrated with its core banking system which is supplied by UltraData Australia.

Thomson is now working toward the final phase, bringing the two together.

“The backbone project was, if you like, the foundation for a number of other organisational initiatives from business and technology perspectives, especially the need for telephony to be secured as a business continuity issue,” he said.

The tender to supply a voice solution covering the organisation’s 30-seat contact centre and also bringing in a total of 260 IP handsets, some used to augment the contact centre staff, was let as a separate contract to the new MPLS network backbone which employs Cisco equipment and ensures the quality of the voice service. “We had done a lot of research into VoIP and knew of the success stories as well as the disasters. So we were able to avoid the common pitfalls with WAN architecture,” explained Thomson. The new network was also meant to provide a robust platform for continuity and security, with the organisation deploying network monitoring and VLANs across the network.

So what began as a data project actually spawned the IP telephony project and became a voice and data project. Once a supplier for the VoIP solution was found, the backbone was deployed in consultation with that supplier.
With plans to put in a Cisco network, Thomson admits he was keen to deploy Cisco telephony as well. Things didn’t turn out that way and once the interdisciplinary project team had settled on a solution it was Cisco competitor Avaya that landed the deal.

“It was clear they provided the best solution and one that we can grow with,” he said.

When the VTCU went to tender it received responses from six organisations, but it was Gold Avaya Partner NSC Enterprise Solutions that impressed in the evaluation process with its clear understanding of the credit union’s business and the technology required to meet its goals.

Members of the evaluation team consisted of the various stakeholders from executive management, sales and service, contact centre management and, of course, Thomson.

“We all tried to bring a unique perspective to the review process,” said Alsbury.

As it turned out, with the six tender responses there was no double up of vendors brought to the table by prospective partners, so the team was faced with a good selection of choices. “We had a lot of people come in and present. Some didn’t take the time to understand our business and just wanted to present the technology and all its bells and whistles,” he said. Some of the integrators were accompanied at this stage by vendor reps and the team was not impressed by those who appeared to be meeting each other for the first time or clearly didn’t have an understanding of the product.

Team members were also frustrated that with some of the proposals it was hard to understand what was included in the price and what was not, what was charged as an annual fee and what was a per user fee. This meant the review committee had to go back – in some cases more than once – to get clarification on the cost and details of some of the tenders. Site visits were organised and for the most part were with organisations of a similar size and style as the credit union, but not always.

In the end, the decision, which was made on the basis of a weighted risk assessment yielded a couple of options which were similarly priced. “We looked at it from a business perspective, looked at what our key concerns were, what our requirements were and then we broke the proposal up and determined what was a must have and what went on the wish list for the future,” said Thomson. “We identified the key areas in terms the risk weightings and applied them to each of the ‘must haves’ then evaluated each tender across a common set of criteria.”

But there was one standout in terms of features, commitment to after-sales service and level of trust the team had in the vendor/integrator team proposing the solution. The VTCU began price negotiations with its preferred provider and ultimately NSC was awarded the contract.

The solution proposed and installed by NSC was based on Avaya Communication Manager with Avaya’s S8500 server at the core of the network and G700 gateways and Local Survivable Processors at each location. The solution supports 130 agents and incorporates non-Avaya technology such as Verint Ultra call recording and GMT workforce management software. There are more than 260 IP handsets throughout the network.

From the deployment side, Thomson stresses the professionalism and project management methodology NSC brought to bear on the task saying: “One of the real reasons for our success was NSC. We were able to work in a collaborative way with them. They walked into this business and understood how we worked in this organisation, but it was also NSC’s willingness to work corroboratively with other solution providers to get the call recording and workforce management solutions all working in harmony with the Avaya contact centre software.

“From a reseller perspective, they did a great job,” said Thomson. “They are a one-stop shop. They are still supporting the whole system including all those third party apps.”

With only 30 agents in the main contact centre, the VTCU has set up many of its member-facing departments as an adjunct with Interactive Voice Recognition skills-based routing used to direct some calls with the lending, mortgage, travel, financial planning and insurance business units all operating as call centres and able to take overflow calls during times of high load.

With a strong member services culture already in place, contact centre manager Paul Wallis said there’s been no backlash from staff recruited into this scheme. “That culture is more noticable in our service centre where those who are not front line are always willing to pitch in if there are members waiting for service,” he said.

Wallis is more than happy with the new arrangements. “The contact centre is going fantastic,” he enthused. “The skills-based routing makes our job so much easier and with reporting available every 30 minutes we can feed back advice and encouragement to the staff on a regular basis. We haven’t had any issues, or outages, or anything like that and the Avaya system is a simple thing to use.”

He’s also confident that as the contact centre grows in numbers and in channels with members increasingly using email as a means of engaging with the organisation, the system will continue to be easy to manage and have plenty of features and functionality to take care of the VTCU’s needs into the future. “That was a big consideration,” said Wallis. “We didn’t want to migrate to a complex system that nobody knew how to use.”