AVI-SPL generates more business for less with Zoom

For AVI-SPL, a global digital enablement solutions provider of cloud communications and audio-visual technology, helping businesses communicate and collaborate better is right in their wheelhouse. So when it came time to move to a new customer care platform, the team had high standards.

After selecting and deploying Zoom Contact Center, the company saw an opportunity to further consolidate its tech stack and simplify communications by leveraging Zoom Phone within its Microsoft Teams environment. See how AVI-SPL benefited from more streamlined management and a seamless direct routing integration with Microsoft Teams that led to the sort of feedback an IT team loves — “very, very few complaints.”

With a contact center team of 200 people across seven countries, providing 24/7 support for over 26,000 service cases for 3,000 unique customers, AVI-SPL saw that its analog customer care solution was lagging behind. Derrick Kelly, VP of solutions enablement, and his team went looking for a simple, integrated, cost-effective solution that would allow employees to deliver meaningful customer support.

As a partner to many communications providers, AVI-SPL knew how to pull together an exacting checklist of feature needs. These included active customer switching, intelligent call routing, skills-based routing, audio and video recording, analytics, and integrations with ServiceNow. Above all, AVI-SPL needed a trustworthy platform partnership to help them pull off a stress-free global deployment of their chosen contact center solution.

After reviewing an extensive list of CCaaS providers, the team was impressed by Zoom Contact Center — the simplicity of its interface and feature set, as well as Zoom’s agility and fast-moving innovation strategy. Deploying a new contact center solution was a big move, so the teams worked together to plan a phased approach. Phase One involved the global roll-out and checking the boxes on the initial requirement list. Phase Two would incorporate the team’s future needs, such as email routing, SMS messaging, automated and agent-based chat, self-service, and the incorporation of more AI-powered tools.

Once implemented, Zoom Contact Center immediately made life simpler for agents and supervisors. With one platform and a single view of customer cases, agents could find, assess, and solve customer queries quickly and easily. Supervisors also felt more in control with live views of call queues, agent statuses, and access to call recordings. And because the teams use Zoom Phone and Zoom Meetings, it’s been easy for everyone to stay in the loop in one integrated contact center portal.

The Zoom and AVI-SPL partnership also helped streamline implementation and eliminate headaches for IT and engineering. AVI-SPL enlisted its Zoom-certified professional services team to work with the AVI-SPL global support team to understand their needs first. From there, the engineering team collaborated with Zoom to develop a systematic approach to platform installation. Plus, the training provided by the AVI-SPL Zoom-certified professional services team alongside the HR team helped ensure that agents got up to speed quickly.

“If anything didn’t match up with the Zoom configuration notes, we could call our Zoom contact. Their response was just really wonderful,” said an AVI-SPL collaboration solutions engineer.

Since AVI-SPL adopted Zoom Contact Center, their global support team has streamlined processes and significantly improved their metrics.

Another feature that has helped the team get to the root of a customer query and solve their issues quickly is the video-enabled feature.

Not only is the AVI-SPL team seeing faster call resolution and an increase in renewals, but they’ve also identified a 5% increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) points. This welcome development is something they attribute to the increased capabilities and improved workflows they’ve experienced since implementing Zoom Contact Center.

After deploying Zoom Contact Center, the team quickly shifted to meet a new opportunity on the rise. One of their phone contracts was coming up for renewal, and they saw the chance to improve upon their fragmented system.

As a global company, AVI-SPL had multiple phone providers across its different regions, each with its own billing and management. The team wanted to consolidate to a single, global phone provider with cloud capabilities and a simpler admin experience.

“We had multiple providers globally and every single one of them had a different portal, so we had to manage many different environments simultaneously. It became kind of a difficult scenario,” Derrick said. “We were looking for someone who could support us in our needs, in the sense of consolidating as many global bills as we possibly could and having a consistent, singular place to manage everything.”

Most importantly, the new system had to be able to integrate with Microsoft Teams via direct routing.

“Part of what we had to evaluate was whether our phone vendor could feed into our Microsoft Teams lines,” Derrick said.

Because consolidation was a key goal, the AVI-SPL team saw the benefits of adding another product to their Zoom portfolio. “It became a clear choice for us to explore what we could do with Zoom to expand our footprint, help us consolidate, and make management a little bit easier. Zoom Phone could feed into Zoom Contact Center and then extend to the meeting side of things — so if we had to elevate a specific instance into a video call, we could do so in the same platform and have it managed in the same location. On top of that, being able to feed into our necessary Microsoft Teams voice lines through direct routing was a very, very compelling part of it,” Derrick said.

Deploying Zoom Phone via direct routing as a service (DRaaS) provided employees with a seamless experience for calling through the Microsoft Teams interface. According to Derrick, one of the indicators of success was that end users had no idea.

However, for Derrick and his team, the benefits are clear. The team found the admin experience intuitive and the streamlined management made their work easier. “The Zoom admin portal is simple,” Derrick said. “When you don’t have to go to seven different places to try and solve a problem, you only have to go to one, it makes ticket turnaround for our internal teams that much faster. It makes the ease of ensuring consistency for our team members that much better.”

Other positives include the ability to create admin groups for different Zoom products according to the company’s needs. Derrick noted that some employees are admins for Zoom Contact Center and others have admin access to Zoom Phone depending on their role; it’s easy to set up these permissions in the Zoom admin portal.

Having Zoom Phone and Microsoft Teams also provides an element of business continuity — if there’s a Teams outage, employees can still make and receive calls on Zoom Phone. To Derrick, that’s just one example of the benefits of coexistence between the two platforms.

“People get so caught up in picking a specific brand for things as opposed to looking at the best solution for them. The fact that Zoom can be an extension of other platforms while still having its own solutions makes for a really, really strong technology offering,” Derrick said.

With the U.S. rollout complete, Derrick and his team are now focused on bringing Zoom Phone to global employees over the next few months. Uniting the company under a singular provider makes for easier management, but as Derrick pointed out, it will also help them maintain operations in the event of an outage.

“Having a global partner providing the voice lines themselves means that if there’s an outage or a scenario in a specific country, there are additional routing options. There are additional ways to support those phone lines utilizing cloud routing, utilizing Zoom’s support structure that’s in place for consistency and high reliability and redundancy,” Derrick explained.

AVI-SPL continues to explore improvements to its customer experience initiatives, including phase-two deployments of Zoom Contact Center features, Zoom Virtual Agent, and more. Additionally, certain teams are experimenting with Zoom AI Companion capabilities like meeting summary and content generation with Zoom Docs.