The customer, a regional bank that is growing extremely rapidly through acquisition, still wanted to maintain its “hometown” bank feel and strong customer focused mindset. They wanted to do this by providing top level customer service with agents on call and only using self-service support for less critical needs (like branch location, hours, directions, etc.) The bank was in the middle of acquiring two other banks and needed to grow its retail footprint, unify brands, and provide consistent service while consolidating back-office operations and maintaining customer-centric key performance indicators (KPIs.) As such the client was looking for a callback solution to help manage peak times and was looking to make a strategic investment in self-service applications that don’t “detract” from the customer experience. Finally, the customer was interested in reducing infrastructure costs and maintenance burden by moving towards a hosted/cloud solution.

• Avaya Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) with Network Trunking – Centralized telephone system environment for unified network coverage across all branches and HQ. Supports branch-based access where local dialed numbers are redirected to a centralized hosted UCaaS environment and any calls destined for local branches are delivered to extensions at each branch.
• Intelligent Customer Experience™ (ICX) (Platform) – Supports a consolidated Branch and Contact Center User Experience. All calls destined for a local branch are redirected on to a centralized ICX/Avaya Experience Portal Platform. There, all local options including specific hours of operations, location information, and routing to local branch personnel is managed. For any services offered by the Contact Center, the customer is seamlessly moved from the branch experience to the contact center experience without any transfers across networks.
• Custom Application: Branch Locator – Facilitates 24-hour access to locate the nearest branch, hear details about location and hours of operation, and transfers the caller to the local branch. This removed over 2,000 calls per month that were previously answered by Call Center personnel. In addition, through automation, it expanded access from 10 hours a day to 24 hours a day.
• Transparent Hosting™ (Cloud Services) – Provides for 7×24 dual redundant services for Customer Experience, Self-service, and Intelligent Callback. The bank never had to purchase, learn, or manage any of the customer experience elements for ongoing support.
• Swampfox Active Management & Monitoring (AMMS) (Managed Services) – Provided ongoing monitoring, management, and administration of the system. This includes moves/adds/changes to the self-service applications, First In Line™ application, and support for Swampfox Agent Desktop™. Swampfox’s ICX Service Monitor was also included as part of managed services to periodically access the infrastructure as a “virtual caller” that checks out availability and access to services to ensure a 24-hour business ready state.
• First In Line™ / Callback (Application) – Balanced service levels by offering callers to receive a callback rather than wait in queue. This allows the bank to staff to an average utilization rather than a peak utilization and gives bank employees a more consistent set of working hours. Additionally, Scheduled Callback was added to capture callbacks for out of hours support, expanding the business hours for contact support from 10 hours a day to 24 hours a day, where calls were automatically blended and returned based on a customer selected appointment. Bank employees do not have to listen to, transcribe and attempt to return calls from left voice mails.

1. Contact center consulting for current initiatives and ongoing projects
2. Experienced, contact center savvy professional services
3. A fully hosted / cloud solution to support a fully integrated architecture
4. Turn-key managed services
5. Robust and intuitive callback solution requiring minimal training
6. Holistic digital strategy that incorporates both web and mobile channels

Initial analysis of the bank’s call center showed many customers were calling to find local branch hours or a local branch (up to 5,000 calls a month), which could easily be handled entirely through self-service. In less than two months of elapsed time, Swampfox implemented ICX, First In Line, and custom branch locator as a Transparent Hosted deployment that extended the bank’s UCaaS environment for the 200+ branches and core contact center needs. Within 2 weeks of go-live, Swampfox supported onboarding of an additional 65 branches from an acquired bank, all without impacting service levels or wait times.

Over the next months, Swampfox implemented scheduled callbacks for weekends and evenings, allowing customers calling after hours or on the weekend, to schedule a callback for the next business day.

Currently, Swampfox supports over 2 million calls a year to branches and the core call center. Swampfox supports more than 30,000 callbacks a year with up to 15% of them scheduled in after-hours situations, saving almost 10,000 hours wait time for customers. This includes 10,000 hours of toll-free charges, trunking, and more. The bank was also able to reduce contact center staffing needs by three full time equivalents and redeployed these agents to more advanced tasks in support of revenue generation. Finally, caller abandon rates have dropped 10% when compared with previous years.