Cisco has struck a deal with the global telecommunications and television company Liberty Global to transform its customer service platform for subscribers across Europe.
Liberty Global hopes to improve the experience for its 22 million subscribers across 12 countries in the region, with the project aiming to simplify contact centre operations and increase productivity, as well as improve the company's customer satisfaction ratings.
The TV and broadband company, which owns a number of consumer brands including Virgin Media and has holdings in companies such as ITV, wants to unify the separate platforms across its six brands in the region by migrating them onto a single system.
"With contact centre agents in 12 different countries, we felt that we had reached a point where transformation was necessary in order to continue delivering the superior customer experience that has become synonymous with our brand," said Mel Longdon, vice president customer experience operations.
"Cisco was the natural choice to help us transform our customer services. We have a fantastic relationship, and they have a clear understanding of our objectives, not least a great track record with previous large-scale contact centre migrations."
Cisco's Unified Contact Centre Enterprise system, Liberty Global hopes, will allow it to use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) features, as well as intelligent routing and sophisticated dialler capabilities to generally enhance the customer experience.
Both companies expect to see the project lead to a reduction in the handling time and the number of abandoned calls, as well as an improvement to first call resolution.
"We were delighted to have been chosen by Liberty Global to support them in such a significant transformation of their customer service operations," said Peter Karlstromer, global service provider, EMEAR at Cisco.
"With a customer base of over 22 million, Liberty Global needed to ensure that its agents had everything they needed, not only to resolve customer enquiries as efficiently as possible, but also to deliver a consistent customer experience across different regions.
"The technologies we are deploying will help make great strides in delivering these objectives, also crucially unifying communication between the different call centres to enable greater collaboration between teams in the future."
The large-scale migration will not only enable Liberty Global to reduce costs, but allow the seamless integration of Cisco and non-Cisco technologies, according to its vice president for transformation delivery Brian Matulin,
"The PE rollout is quite advanced with over 2,000 users already on the platform with a further 7,000 to be on-boarded by May," he said.
"We have taken the opportunity to exploit the technology and expand the platform to employees outside of the Contact Centre, covering both front and back of house activities, on and off-shore."
