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This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/voip/0,3800004463,39131294,00.htm

Pru calls in VoIP to improve customer service
Case study: Boosting customer service with new networks and middleware

By Steve Ranger

Published: Tuesday 21 June 2005

Financial services giant Prudential plans to cut its costs and improve customer service with a major rollout of voice over IP technology.

The company outsourced its voice and data networks to BT in November last year and is now in the process of moving its call centres over to VoIP technology.

Prudential UK's CIO John Worth told silicon.com: "What we've done is outsourced our voice and data network to BT and taken the opportunity to transform the network at the same time."

Worth said Prudential will be one of the first organisations with call centres in multiple locations - including one in Mumbai - to move to VoIP: "It's a big and interesting step for us and the industry.

"It's complicated because there aren't many projects of this type that have been done previously. There's not a lot of experience in rolling out full VoIP to an organisation like ours," he added.

The first call centre will move over in July to August on a pilot basis. If that is successful the next stage is rolling out its Cisco technology to the others in the latter part of the year.

"The main advantage will be in terms of customer experience. What we felt VoIP could give us is that the customers will be left holding on the line for less time and there is more chance that [it will be answered] by someone who can deal with their policy details," Worth said.

Prudential plans to check the number the customer calls in on against the numbers in its policy records to direct the call to the right operative more quickly, so that less calls will be answered and then handed over to other people in the organisation.

"It is very important that people are kept waiting for as little time as possible," Worth explained.

As well as improving customer satisfaction the new network should cut costs: "Over the period of the deal we found this was going to cost less than running the networks internally," Worth said, predicting a five to 10 per cent saving over the life of the deal.

The new infrastructure will also open up the potential for homeworking in "the fullness of time", he said.

Instead of staff coming into a call centre they could work from home with both data and voice piped to them. "It gives us a lot of flexibility," he said.

The network developments follow moves by Prudential to introduce a layer of service-oriented architecture middleware across its underlying systems to provide a new front end for the customer service team, again aimed at improving the customer experience.

Previously when a customer called into a call centre with a query on a policy the call centre operative would have to go into the contract engine for that type of policy.

The contract engine, a green screen-style application, was hard to read and if the customer had another query on a different policy they would have to close down that content engine and go into a different one, all of which was time-consuming.

The 4Front application which Prudential has developed now gives staff an easier-to-understand view of the content engine and the ability to answer multiple queries without opening up lots of different systems.

And Worth said the work is unlikely to stop there: "Like any financial services company we've got a huge amount of legacy systems and work processes that we are looking to simplify, perhaps through using middleware."