CEB SHL Talent Services is revolutionising its talent management service with Vonage Contact Center

Challenged to restructure costs and re-evaluate service standards, SHL decided to bring its service desk offering in-house in a bid to provide consistency of support and optimise efficiency. Many of the offices had as few as two call handlers and it was not commercially viable to sustain this modus operandi. To this end, SHL took the strategic decision to consolidate its service desks from the multiple, fragmented environments to just three: Stockholm, the UK and the US.

However, according to Jag Tucker, Global Front Office Operations Manager, SHL, one of the most demanding requirements was time to market. “To make sure we delivered a consistently rewarding service experience, we wanted the solution to be deployed within an eight weeks timeframe – from design to implementation,” he says. “It also had to meet robust budget targets and disaster recovery objectives.”

Deployed and operational in only eight weeks, Vonage’s cloud-based contact centre technology integrates seamlessly with SHL’s Salesforce CRM system, allowing the company to run its entire inbound sales and customer service business using lean hosted technology.

Seamless integration between Vonage and Salesforce

SHL selected the Vonage platform, an enterprise-class contact centre, delivered via a true cloud model.  The solution integrates telephony seamlessly to Salesforce CRM – the bedrock of SHL’s customer relationship management strategy. Unlike a traditional contact centre, where the hardware can be expensive and takes months to implement, SHL’s hosted contact centre implementation uses a remote cloud-based telephony system to provide the links and call plan intelligence between the caller and agent. SHL didn’t need to pay out any additional capital expenditure; it was able to only pay for what it uses ‘on-demand’. There are also no hidden costs for maintenance as Vonage takes full responsibility for the infrastructure. “Vonage's cloud computing approach made all the difference,” says Jag. “They could number source globally and port or redirect any of the existing SHL numbers to any one of their platforms. The company was willing to meet our time frame of eight weeks from design to implementation and their costs were considerably less than traditional on-premise providers.”

Vonage kept its promise and made sure the cloud-based contact centre technology was installed with all SHL staff trained and operational within the eight-week deadline. Indeed, the later Salesforce CRM integration was completed in one weekend. None of the other suppliers that SHL evaluated could even contemplate meeting this timeframe.

Increased efficiency and improved caller experience

So how does it work? The Vonage Contact Center provides SHL agents with access to a unified, shared and comprehensive source of customer communication. Users benefit from one, easy to use interface to manage calls and view all contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities and cases. Inbound calls are announced to the agent with a link to the caller’s details; and customer data held in Salesforce is used to route calls intelligently to the most appropriate agent or team. This dramatically increases SHL’s efficiency and improves the caller experience.

The SHL UK agents collectively speak more than 30 languages; Vonage identifies the region a call is coming from and directs it to the appropriate agent which speaks that language. The customers aren’t even aware that this process has taken place. “Vonage for Salesforce gives SHL agents a single, easy-to-use interface to manage calls and customer contact information,” Jag explains. “Value-based routing functionality gets the right agent talking to the caller the first time; returning callers can be prioritised in any queue; and the SHL agents can schedule tasks to make outbound calls.

Moreover, individual caller treatments make the caller feel special and increase up-selling/cross-selling opportunities.” Improved caller intelligence based on Salesforce CRM data Caller Line Identification (CLID) is one of the key features of Vonage Contact Center that supports the SHL team. When an inbound call is connected, agents are presented with a prepopulated display with the caller’s details, based on data held in Salesforce CRM. This results in time and cost savings and enhances the service to SHL’s customers.

This cloud-based, multi-tenant approach has other advantages, allowing SHL agents to log on and take calls from wherever they are in the world, so long as they have internet access. During the snowstorms in the UK in 2010, for example, many agents were housebound. However, they were able to log onto the Vonage platform remotely and deal with calls as if they were in the office.

By standardising on the Vonage cloud-based contact centre solution, SHL has been rewarded with a raft of other benefits:

• Increased agent satisfaction: SHL has experienced only four per cent staff turnover since introducing Vonage for Salesforce
• More than 90% of calls answered within 20 seconds globally 
• Led to average 1.3 per cent call abandon rate 
• Reduced average call waiting time to only 14 seconds globally 
• Achieved 95% first-time resolution
• Led to speedier calls and informed greeting to a known customer before they have given any contact details 
• All intelligent voice recognition (IVR) voice prompts have been transformed into a new streamlined approach with professional recording artists 
• Reliable service delivery: calls can be redirected seamlessly anywhere in the world in a few clicks