Utilities
PSS customers range from small city or regional utilities to some of the largest electric and gas utilities in the United States.
CTI Improves Utility's Call Center Agent Productivity
A utility hired PSS to design and deploy a replacement for their existing "one off" CTI solution. They wanted a stable platform that could support their existing IVR, PBX, and back office systems today, yet be flexible enough to accommodate future contact center growth at their own pace.
In order to fully understand the system requirements, PSS conducted a Discovery Workshop that brought together all of the Utility's stakeholders with a PSS team of CTI experts. Based on these requirements and priorities, PSS developed a CTI architecture and deployment strategy for the utility. This system included:
- A Genesys Inbound voice solution provided intelligent IVR call handling based on real time statistical data.
- SAP integration to provide CTI screen pops to agents based on data collected during the inbound IVR segment of the call
- The ability to pass CTI data along with calls that are transferred
- A Genesys Outbound solution so they can initiate automated calling campaigns that inform customers of planned utility outages in their area
- High Availability components to ensure maximum uptime and simplify disaster recovery.
Once this system was deployed the Utility's contact center agents enjoyed higher productivity because it reduced the need to duplicate tasks. It also improved overall contact center efficiency by boosting productivity across previously separate business functions. As call volume increased, this improved productivity eliminated the need to hire additional agents to handle the work load.
CTI Overlay for a Regional Utility
You don't always have to start from scratch to deploy a CTI solution that meets your needs. A utility in the Southeast had two call center sites, each with two Nortel IVR systems and two Avaya PBX systems. They used their Avaya Definity PBX systems for all of their call routing, but any time a call was transferred between sites the data associated with the call could not follow it.
PSS was able to provide a CTI overlay solution that leveraged the customer's existing IVR infrastructure and PBX routing strategies. PSS added Genesys I-Servers that integrated to their Nortel IVR systems and Genesys T-Servers that integrated to their Avaya PBX system PSS built a custom .NET desktop for their agents that tied into the Genesys framework and integrated to their back office application. Now, when their Avaya PBX routes a call to an agent, the system delivers the associated data directly to the CTI desktop regardless of location and pops a screen to their back-office application
IVR Integration for a Municipal Utility
A municipal utility in the Midwest needed to keep its legacy IVR applications in step with broader SOA initiatives being implemented throughout its IT infrastructure. Its legacy Nortel IVR platform was aging, but PSS was intimately familiar with the utility’s environment having supported the IVR platform and PeriPro applications for years.
The utility engaged PSS Professional Services Organization to expand the functionality of their IVR applications that handled outages and customer accounts, and at the same time restructure their back-end integration so they could reuse SOA standards-based web services. PSS was able to complete the re-integration very quickly and cost effectively by deploying FlexxBridge. The PeriPro application makes requests to FlexxBridge via http. To access web services, FlexxBridge interrogates a WSDL document and uses XML files to build an XML message with a SOAP envelope.
FlexxBridge simplified the integration of the IVR applications to the new web services and also provided an integration point that could evolve as the utility's SOA initiative evolved over time. Today, the utility’s own developers are able to quickly add functionality and re-use components within FlexxBridge so they can enable new services online without having to "reinvent the wheel."