An Azure migration for a major Australian retailer and a platform to help non-profits evaluate social good initiatives are among the finalists in the Customer Experience category of the 2022 CRN Impact Awards.
The three CRN Customer Experience Award finalists are:
- Arinco's migration of a major retailer’s IT environment to Microsoft Azure
- CCNA's upgrade of PC retailer Umart’s telephony and contact centre solution
- Cevo’s Amplify Online Indicator Engine for the Centre for Social Impact
Arinco migrates major retailer’s IT systems to Microsoft Azure
Arinco was by engaged by a large retailer to migrate back-end workloads for its online store to Microsoft Azure. The retailer was looking for a partner to support the upgrade and consolidate its IT systems into one cloud provider whilst increasing its website traffic load capacity during peak shopping periods for an improved check-out experience.
With the retailer's existing APIs servicing various aspects of its business – including inventory management, pricing, product information and finance – any downtime of these key APIs had the potential to affect the whole customer journey.
Arinco worked closely with the large retailer’s team to ensure that the migrated workloads were moved to a secure, well-managed environment, and consolidated the retailer's APIs into the Azure cloud.
Since the migration to Azure, the retailer's API backends and cloud environment have run smoothly. Test data has shown that the Azure infrastructure can perform under high load, even when there is five times more website traffic than peak shopping periods.
This has given the business the much-needed confidence that its website will run successfully during these periods, keeping customers engaged and enabling continued delivery of elevated service levels.
CCNA deploys new telephony, contact centre for PC retailer Umart
PC retailer Umart had been dealing with a large number of customer complaints related to service calls. It relied on a basic, inflexible phone system managed by external providers, and call quality was poor for overseas agents in Manila speaking to Australian customers via poor quality phone lines.
The existing solution was dependent on a solution provider's engineers to make changes to users, call flows, operating hours and holidays, resulting in increased costs and time to make changes.
Umart sought to replace the system with a new feature-rich but affordable cloud-based solution that was easy to configure, quick to implement and reliable. It turned to Converged Communication Network Applications (CCNA) and GoTo.
CCNA recommended GoTo’s GoTo Connect Phone, Meeting and Messaging, and GoTo Contact Centre solutions. This would enable Umart to use a web interface.to make its own changes, such as changes to phone systems and routing.
The migration process, including number porting, took eight weeks. The new system helped Umart save hours of customer service maintenance and administration time by using its new administration portal. It also helped Umart reduce time spent on incident management by enabling IT and customer service teams to quickly respond to and mitigate issues.
Cevo develops platform to help non-profits evaluate social good initiatives
The Centre for Social Impact (CSI), a collaboration of UNSW, Swinburne University of Technology, Flinders University and The University of Western Australia, supports Australia’s not-for-profit sector through research, education and tools. The organisation sought to measure the effectiveness of social purpose initiatives to ensure value for money.
CSI engaged Melbourne-based Cevo to develop a platform to study the effectiveness of the $510 billion spent on social purpose initiatives each year, by enabling non-profits to measure this in a consistent and scalable way.
The Amplify Online Indicator Engine is an AWS-based platform that provides automated, tailored recommendations to guide users in selecting which outcomes to measure and the relative indicators that can most accurately deduce if the outcomes have been achieved. These indicators are designed to provide a consistent, scalable way to measure the impact of social purpose initiatives.
The platform is free for small and medium not-for-profit organisations, which are usually restrained by funding when wanting to evaluate their social good initiatives. A quantitative evaluation typically costs upwards of $100,000.
Since the platform launched in March 2022, some 300 organisations have registered on it - a third are small not-for-profits and about another third are large organisations, dealing with such issues as climate change, homelessness, poverty, youth, disability, mental health, Indigenous rights and women’s rights.
The Amplify Online Indicator Engine is estimated to save the wider not-for-profit sector $300 million in evaluation costs annually, according to Cevo. The standardised quantitative evaluation methods are also strengthening the sector, it claims.
Announcing the CRN Impact Award winners
The CRN Impact Award winners will be revealed and celebrated at the gala awards ceremony and dinner on August 25th at the Sheraton Grand Mirage Resort on the Gold Coast, as part of the CRN Pipeline 2022 conference.
The awards ceremony and dinner will be an opportunity for finalists to share their success with CRN journalists and the wider channel community and to network with Australia’s IT channel award winners. It will also be an opportunity for non-finalists to learn which channel partners kicked meaningful goals for customers in the last year, and meet them in-person.
Channel partners that attend the CRN Pipeline conference on August 24 and 25 at the same location can also network with Australia’s IT channel leaders and immerse themselves in top-class talks and roundtables about key business challenges and opportunities including staff shortages and hiring, economic outlook and key growth prospects.
Attend this year's premier channel awards, networking and strategic talk-fest - see the CRN Impact Awards and CRN Pipeline 2022 agenda.
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