CUSTOMER PROFILE
Open Network Exchange (ONE) signed with a major cruise line to deliver profitenhancing transformational services. This relationship quickly expanded to a handover of all CCaaS management, which ONE quickly rebuilt on the CXone platform. With new processes and infrastructure, CXone and ONE delivered a huge lift in reliability and usability that addressed long-standing problems of friction and inefficiency between the cruise line and their consumers.
01 THE BEFORE
Unprecedented challenges and unreliable legacy processes
Open Network Exchange began work with a cruise line partner in late 2021 that was reeling from both internal and external issues. Like all cruise operators, the partner had suffered extensive business disruptions due to industry-wide shutdowns, reduced demand for travel generally, and the lingering effects of a rapid switch to work-from-home conditions in 2020. The partner also was running on a heterogeneous contact center stack with Avaya, Aspect, Verint, and Qualtrics products, much of which was at or nearing vendor end-of-life.
These were not merely aesthetic or contractual problems: they had a real and pronounced impact on the consumer experience. Even with passenger volumes running at just 25% of capacity, the vast majority of calls to the cruise line ended in abandonment. When ONE first engaged with the partner, 80% of calls were abandoned, and average speed to answer was over 45 minutes. The fact that the industry was still in the early stages of recovery made it clear that these challenges had more than one root cause. “We knew that if they were facing these problems with only half of their ships on the water, and those ships only half full, that this was a platformstability issue,” Romero said.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
From irreparable to innovative
The partner, historically one of the industry’s largest and best-known brands, was understandably of two minds about the need for change: how could its legacy processes be badly broken if they had also been part of the company’s legacy of growth and success? So despite the warning signs there was still some interest in preserving the legacy infrastructure and making incremental improvements.
ONE originally tried to conform to this resistance to change. But early concepts to bolster the architecture in order to bring new agents online were quickly abandoned. In addition to the inefficiencies and instability of the existing stack, ONE found that the client’s ACD physically crashed two or three times per month. “With their out-ofdate, out-of-warranty system, the partner would have been looking at a few million dollars in upgrades just to stabilize it,” Romero said.
Instead of taking on the change resistance head-on, ONE decided to show rather than tell their partner a better way. ONE stood up its own CXone instance to handle the initial portion of the inbound call business handed over by the partner, rerouting traffic from the partner’s Avaya system. Early results were so dramatically positive that the partner soon asked for the CXone implementation to become its new core contact center platform.
03 THE SOLUTION
Full steam ahead
After contracting with the partner in December 2021, ONE began CXone training in early January 2022 and went live at the end of that month. After recognizing early successes, the cruise line asked ONE to expand the fresh CXone environment to take over the entirety of its contact center operation. That full transition began in August 2022 and within three months the combined roster of 2,200 agents for the cruise line was running on the new CXone instance managing 7.7 million annual interactions across nearly 200 toll-free numbers.
In addition to retiring multiple legacy systems, ONE brought a fresh eye and greater detail to the processes governing the contact center. Call flow documentation was revamped based on actual practices and hard data, exposing a number of inefficiencies and misguided assumptions about root causes behind call volume. For example, ONE determined that as much as one-half of the call volume into the client’s sales lines were actually customer service calls.
Process improvements include expanded access to analytics and data reporting for all authorized users, as well as easier access to call recordings and live listen-in. These improvements have helped the partner keep agents and supervisors more invested and aligned in both individual call outcomes and big-picture trends.
04 THE RESULTS
A radically improved experience
Moving past the client’s end-of-life systems to a modern cloud contact center environment delivered dramatic early returns. “The first week on CXone, we cut ASA from 45 minutes to 10 minutes. By the second month, we were under 90 seconds,” Romero said.
The dramatic reduction in ASA was unsurprisingly coupled with an equally robust improvement in call abandonment rate, dropping from 80% to below 3%. Data analysis by ONE discovered that at least 35% of existing call volume was due to callbacks after abandonment. As ASA improved, this finding held up and call volumes also fell. This provided second-order benefits for the partner, which needs fewer staffed agent seats than were predicted by past volume projections.
The speedier service is also leading to shorter handle times, which ONE analysis attributes to callers feeling more focused and less frustrated now that they are not experiencing long hold times and other delays.
05 THE FUTURE
Onward to new projects
As a result of the successful and rapid rollout, ONE now manages the complete contact center, including workforce management, CSAT surveys, and call recording for the cruise line. Along with using the revamped contact center as a base for the loyalty and profitability work ONE was originally contracted to deliver, ONE hopes to expand the relationship into other brands owned by the same parent company.
ONE is also looking to apply lessons from the highspeed rollout to future projects. “We learned things from the fast rollout, which put a lot of accountability into the hands of the front line,” Romero said. “We believe that empowering the front lines really helped with change management and helped us move as fast as we did.”
