Lowell signs on to single sign-on with Avaya

Tell us about the new Avaya AXP contact solution. Why did you make the move?

We’d noticed how agents working on the email and chat channels were struggling to work with different systems. It was a pain to switch between them. People needed more training. And they had to sign-in separately to each system.

When one of the legacy systems reached end-of-life and lost its support, we decided to replace both with a single combined solution, the Avaya AXP.

With single sign-on?

Yes, but that’s not the only benefit. A combined email and chat platform that’s simpler to use means less training, fewer credentials to keep track of, and more efficient support. And because we’re only licencing one system rather than two, we’re also banking a cost saving.

The Avaya AXP is cloud-based. How does that help Lowell?

Being a cloud-based solution, it’s always at the latest version. So we’re always meeting the most up-to-date security standards, and we automatically get all of Avaya’s upgrades the moment they release them.

How did you rollout the solution without compromising service levels?

We decided early on to trial it with one team before pushing on with the full deployment. That was crucial. We piloted with the first email team in March and then spent a couple of months gathering feedback, ironing out problems, and tweaking the system with Avaya and Maintel, our business partner.

So when it came to the full rollout in May - to the other email teams and the Live Chat team - we knew we were delivering a solution that did exactly what our agents needed it to do.

These things always throw up unexpected challenges. What surprised you?

A couple of things.

AXP manages emails in a significantly different way to how our Operations Team were doing it at the time. So we worked closely with them to understand the differences and work out new processes. By the time we got to the first team going live with the solution, we’d pretty much nailed it. Then it was just a matter of smoothing out a few rough edges ready for the full rollout to the business.

The other challenge was around reporting. The email and chat teams have specific reporting requirements that Avaya’s out-of-the-box reporting did not meet. But one of the reasons we opted for the Avaya solution was the flexibility of its reporting suite. We built our own custom reports that – in most cases – replicated the reports the teams had been getting from the legacy systems.

It sounds like a great success. What’s next?

This project is just the beginning of our plans for Avaya. Our next mission is to replace our outbound dialler. Beyond that, we’ll be exploring the possibility of integrating other contact channels into the Avaya AXP, like voice, asynchronous messaging, social media messaging, and so on.

We’ll always need to communicate with our customers, one way or another. Our job is to make it as easy as possible for customers to engage with us.