Case Study: Alphanumeric Systems

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining business continuity was crucial for Alphanumeric to support its pharmaceutical clients.

“We support global clinical drug trials for pharmaceutical companies,” explains Jay Baucom, Senior Vice President, Global Operations and Chief Information Officer. “We operate very specialized contact centers around the world with a remote agent model.”

“It’s critical that patients and health care providers always have access to our support during clinical drug trails, so we require 24/7/365 uptime from our contact center vendor. Downtime is not an option for us,” he said.

Like other companies, Alphanumeric also needed to quickly transition its 400 agents to working remotely during the COVID-19 virus. However, this was a complex task since its workforce is spread out over six different countries.

“Some of our team were already working from home,” Jay said. “But we needed to transition the others to remote work as soon as possible.”

THE SOLUTION

Alphanumeric had used CXone for some time and regularly practiced disaster scenarios. But with a worldwide pandemic, the company quickly realized that its focus needed to change.

“We’ve concentrated on business continuity and disaster recovery for the past eight or nine years— we’ve always planned for it,” Jay said. “To that end, we practice our disaster recovery plan twice a year, but we’ve always planned for local disaster scenarios like hurricanes, which would only impact one area of our global operations.”

“COVID-19 is very different because it affected all our worldwide contact center agents. I don’t think anyone had the foresight to realize that a pandemic would completely shut down the global economy. With CXone, though, we quickly pivoted and moved everyone to working remotely within 24 hours while providing service continuity to our customers.”

“Technology is the foundation for our contact centers. When we started our global expansion in 2012, we knew we needed a partner like NICE CXone that could scale with us as our operations grew.”

Strong Uptime Attracts New Customers

NICE CXone’s consistent availability and 99.9% uptime guarantee reassured Jay that his operations would continue running.

“CXone is the foundation of our technology arsenal. When we first evaluated CXone, we liked NICE CXone’s distributed redundancy, its worldwide data centers and its scalability. We still haven’t seen anything in the marketplace that can compete with it.”

“The fact that we’ve maintained business operations for our clients during the pandemic attracts other companies that are interested in our services,” Jay said. “We’re now pursuing large opportunities with state and local governments, because they’re having a tough time handling the huge increase in constituents’ requests for COVID-19 information. CXone is the linchpin that enables us to pursue those prospects.”

Advice to Other Contact Centers

Jay shares some the lessons learned during the pandemic, so other contact centers can benefit.

“Communicating with your employees is critical,” he said. “Make sure they feel safe and know you’re there for them as a company. Meet with them regularly.”

Jay also credits CXone with contributions to a positive employee experience. “When you give your agents easy-to-use technology like CXone, it makes their jobs simpler. They’ll also be more satisfied, which translates into delivering a great customer experience.”

He also advises contact centers to build a strong partner ecosystem. “If you had trouble transitioning your agents to working from home, that’s a sign that you need to closely examine the partners you’re working with.”

“We realized early on that we needed to surround ourselves with partners who could scale with us as our operations expanded. They also needed to have a similar philosophy on adopting and adhering to digital transformation. NICE CXone fits those criteria.”

“Digital transformation isn’t just a buzzword,” he said. “It’s critical to our business, just like it is for other companies.”

“If you want to survive in today’s global economy, you have to focus on digital transformation. Use a solution like CXone to get information to your clients quickly, efficiently and as reasonably priced as possible.”

Alphanumeric’s business is thriving, even during a worldwide pandemic, thanks to its in-depth disaster recovery planning and CXone.

“Partnering with NICE CXone was a great business decision,” Jay said. “CXone’s flexibility means our employees can work from anywhere while still servicing our customers. Maintaining business continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic is validation that we made the right investment in CXone.”