To help its customers navigate coronavirus complexities, one of the world’s largest travel security and medical services providers put its international 30+ contact centers on high alert.
The company provides preventative COVID-19 programs and medical responses for business travelers and expatriates. Its 24/7 global contact centers take upwards of 5 million assistance calls per year. They are staffed by more than 800 agents, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, multilingual coordinators and logistics specialists.
However, the company was also facing its own coronavirus restrictions. As the demand for its services increased with the accelerating pandemic, it also needed to move all its agents to work from home for their own safety.
Targeting help to where it is needed
The company had deployed an Orange Business IP telephony and contact center solution. This is a global integrated service that ensures a caller gets connected to an agent that has the specific skills to meet their needs.
The company asked Orange to urgently help with its business continuity plan to ensure its operations could run as normal for its MNC clients, without any disruptions.
Agents working out of the company’s global contact centers needed to start working from home immediately. The company wanted to increase the number of agents taking calls from home to deal with the growing influx of calls the pandemic was beginning to generate.
Orange quickly increased the number of licenses on the contact center solution from 1,000 to 1,600 users. The Orange solution can handle all the call routing end-to-end and delivers a consistent quality of service wherever the agents are located, be it office or home. The system provides local access numbers in each country and a single point of contact.
The company also needed to ensure that its agents working from home across continents had access to consistent, high performance connectivity. This required immediate bandwidth upgrades for the agents who are dialing in using a private VPN connection, together with an increase in VPN licenses.
The organization uses the Orange global network. Orange first doubled the capacity of its three VPN gateways in London, Singapore and the U.S., taking the number of concurrent users on each gateway from 1,000 to 2,000 and providing a total capacity of 6,000 users. Some of the network bandwidth connections were increased by using firewalls. The firewalls were already in place, so Orange simply upgraded the bandwidth at these multiple site locations.
Previously, the company had around 500 to 1,000 people remotely working concurrently. These tended to be specialist medics, for example. Now the company needs to support virtually all of its employees working from home, requiring full support from Orange.
At the same time, the number of support tickets for complex changes to configurations for contact center agents has doubled. The figure has gone up from an average of 200 changes to 400 changes per month. Orange has handled them all within hours remotely, which has meant there have been no disruptions in operations. This has allowed the customer to retain a high-quality service throughout the crisis for its multinational clients in their time of need.
Supporting contact center agents across the globe
New health and security risks demand swift action. Orange has helped its customer every step of the way in supporting it with the expertise required to provide the professional medical and security expertise MNCs rely on in a global crisis.
1,600
Contact center licenses increased from 1,000 to 1,600 for 24/7 agent and backoffice availability