Case Study: Digital Room

ON THE NiCE SOLUTION

“With CXone, we improved agent utilization and service levels while growing 25 percent. Issues with downtime and system updates are now a thing of the past.”

Andrew Latimer

Chief Information Officer
Digital Room

THE CHALLENGE

Before CXone, Digital Room used a Mitel PBX phone system hosted by a third-party reseller. The company also used LivePerson and Zendesk® for chat and email. This mix of disparate solutions led to issues with downtime and updates. “Downtime was our number one issue,” says Andrew Latimer, Chief Information Officer of Digital Room. “Each vendor would point to the other as the source of the problem and nothing would get resolved.”

Similar issues arose when it came to system updates. “We couldn’t make updates to the system ourselves,” says Andrew. “Often our reseller would bring in Mitel to address the issue. It was a painful process that could take days to coordinate.”

At the same time, Digital Room was growing by 25 percent annually and struggled to schedule agents. “All of our scheduling and forecasting was done using Excel spreadsheets,” says Andrew. “This worked fine when we only had 50 agents. But when we grew to 300 agents, it was overwhelming to create schedules manually.”

Adding to the challenge was a lack of unified reporting. “Voice, chat and email were all handled by different software solutions,” says Andrew. “We couldn’t get a unified picture of how our contact centers and individual agents were performing.” As a result, the company was unable to realize efficiencies or increase agent utilization.

THE SOLUTION

When it was time to look for a unified solution, Andrew had his requirements ready. “We wanted a consolidated cloud platform that supported multiple channels, IVR and integrated workforce management,” he says. “The solution needed to have the flexibility to grow with us — and the price had to be right.”

Andrew soon found that NiCE CXone had the functionality Digital Room needed. “We liked the architecture and features,” he says. “We also liked that NiCE CXone had experience supporting overseas contact centers. The positive references we received were encouraging.”

In addition, CXone is intuitive, so Digital Room staff could customize the solution themselves. “We wanted the ability to make our own updates, and we can easily do that with CXone,” says Andrew. “We also can engage NiCE CXone experts when we need extra help, which gives us the best of both worlds.”

OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED

Unified Solution with Less Downtime and Easy Customization

With CXone, Digital Room now has a unified cloud contact center solution with far better system redundancy. “Our previous vendor had many issues with hardware and networks which resulted in lots of downtime for our contact center,” says Andrew. “NiCE CXone has a strong data center presence around the world and, as a result, our uptime is where it should be.”

With CXone, Digital Room can make system changes independently instead of relying on a vendor. “We no longer have to ask for changes, wait for them to be made and then discover they were implemented incorrectly,” says Andrew. “Today, we have control and can get things done much more quickly and efficiently.”

“We had a cheap contact center solution before and it didn’t work out well for us. Once we consolidated everything onto CXone, we certainly experienced cost savings.”

Andrew Latimer

Chief Information Officer
Digital Room

Greater Efficiencies and Scalability with CXone Workforce Management

Before CXone, each agent was dedicated to a specific channel and couldn’t help out if another channel was overwhelmed. As a result, agent utilization was poor and it was difficult to optimize staffing levels.

Since all channels are now unified on CXone, Digital Room can right-size its team of agents. “With CXone, we can easily shift agents between channels,” Andrew says. “If a channel gets overwhelmed, other agents can step in to help. As a result, we’ve had a marked improvement in utilization.”

At the same time, implementing CXone Workforce Management has made forecasting and scheduling easier and more precise. “It’s hard to imagine managing 300 agents’ schedules with an Excel spreadsheet, but that’s what we did,” says Andrew. “It was a pretty haphazard process, and resulted in struggles with service and staffing levels. Workforce Management helped us gain real efficiencies in staffing and much greater accuracy with forecasting.”

As a result, Digital Room hasn’t had to grow its contact center staff proportionately to its business growth, which makes it well positioned for the future.

Moreover, revenue is growing, and service levels have improved. “We’re seeing increased conversions on calls and reduced cycle time in closing out customer issues,” says Andrew. “In addition, we’ve become much more consistent in providing excellent service.”

Deeper Insights into Performance with Unified Reporting

Today, Digital Room has complete visibility into performance across voice, email and chat with unified reporting. “With CXone, our reporting is integrated, which gives us a ton of flexibility,” says Andrew. “We can customize reports to get answers to our questions very quickly and easily. We can even pull data from our internal systems using CXone APIs. This flexibility has made a real impact on our bottom line.”

“With our old system, I used to get a lot of complaints about our inability to report on specific data,” he continues. “But I haven’t heard a single grumble about reporting since we’ve been using CXone.”

More Uptime, Increased Flexibility and Better Agent Utilization

With CXone, Digital Room no longer struggles with downtime or delays in system updates. The company has also experienced a marked improvement in agent utilization and now has detailed insights into its performance. As a result, it is operating more efficiently than ever — all while growing 25 percent year over year.

Andrew praises NiCE CXone and CXone. “In terms of features and flexibility, CXone is one of the best platforms out there,” he says. “Uptime is great, and the support we’ve gotten from the NiCE CXone team is excellent. I would certainly recommend CXone to any contact center.”