Case Study: Radisson Hotel Group

As a leading global hospitality company and one of the world’s largest hotel groups, Radisson Hotel Group encompasses seven distinctive hotel brands and more than 1,400 hotels in operation and under development around the world. Its portfolio includes Radisson Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson, Radisson RED, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson and Country Inn & Suites by Radisson.

Solution

John began the search for a new contact center solution and eventually narrowed his list to seven potential vendors, including NiCE CXone. “We looked at functionality, global scalability and value for capital dollars,” says John.

After nine months of thorough evaluation, NiCE CXone’s capabilities and scalability swayed the decision. “The next nearest candidate wasn’t mature enough to meet our stringent global requirements,” he says.

“We view CXone as a ‘future-proofed’ investment. No matter how our business evolves, we’re confident CXone can support us.”

John Zurn

Senior Director
Global Reservations and Customer Care
Radisson Hotel Group

Opportunities identified

Global scalability and future proofing achieved with CXone

With CXone, Radisson Hotel Group can quickly and easily expand or contract its contact center operations around the globe for minimal cost. “We don’t need to build a center and staff it when we expand into a new area,” John explains. “The BPO takes on that responsibility, which means we avoid heavy fixed asset obligations. The beauty of CXone is that we can easily manage and partner with the BPO as if it were our own operation because we’re both using the same platform.With CXone, we continually monitor our BPOs’ key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure they’re meeting our expectations.”

In fact, CXone enabled Radisson Hotel Group to effortlessly expand its operations in 2019. “We added two new BPOs in Bogota and Bucharest very quickly. We couldn’t have done that with the Avaya system.”

In addition, Radisson views CXone as a “futureproofed” investment. “No matter how our business evolves, CXone can support us,” says John.

“Because CXone is a cloud platform, we always receive the latest updates for no extra charge.” “Also, we can integrate with nearly any thirdparty solution using CXone APIs. That gives us enormous flexibility to customize as needed. For instance, we’re rolling out a new ERP [enterprise resource planning] across our entire organization. I simply gave the CXone APIs to the ERP integrators and told them the type of integration we wanted. The APIs make life so much simpler.”

Just as importantly, updates to the CXone system can be made quickly. “It used to take us two weeks to make updates to our old system. Now it takes two minutes with CXone,” he says.

Agent utilization jumps 20% with omnichannel

Many contact centers handle multiple communications channels, but those channels might not be truly integrated, which can cause inefficiencies. “We’ve evolved into a true, omnichannel contact center,” explains John. “In fact, our agent utilization jumped 20% since using CXone for omnichannel.”

Radisson will soon begin to use the CXone Work Items channel to integrate with a third-party social listening solution. Using Work Items allows Radisson to process social interactions using CXone routing and handling just like a native chat or email interaction. Work Items are also part of Omnichannel Session Handling, which enables Radisson agents to handle one or more social media interactions concurrently with its other channels. As a result, agent utilization is high, since they can handle multiple interactions across different channels at the same time.

Workforce management dramatically reduces BPO costs

CXone Workforce Management has played a key role in streamlining BPO management. “We’ve reduced our BPO costs with Workforce Management,” says John.

“We use Workforce Management to examine historical and projected call volumes for each contact center location,” he says. “Our expenses are directly impacted by Workforce Management, because we’re no longer relying on the BPO to tell us how many agents are needed. Workforce Management accurately estimates the required workforce levels, and in turn, we tell the BPOs how many agents they need to staff at a given time.”

Quality scores increase 15–20%

Radisson Hotel Group uses CXone Quality Management to capture screen and audio recordings of agent-customer interactions. With its old system, Radisson captured only 10% of calls. Now, 100% of calls are voice captured, and 30% are screen captured. Using these recordings for coaching has resulted in a 15–20% improvement in quality scores and a 5–7% increase in customer satisfaction scores.

Radisson uses the recordings for coaching and follow-up. “We review the recordings to assess if the agent needs more training,” explains John. “Our quality scores have improved dramatically, because we’re more effective in diagnosing issues. It’s great for both new and experienced agents.”

Today, Radisson Hotel Group’s global contact center operations are unified on CXone, which has boosted agent utilization, reduced costs and improved quality scores while increasing customer satisfaction.

John’s advice for contact centers looking to switch from an out-of-date software solution?

“Don’t analyze everything before you start, “ he says “Begin immediately, and build a team to help you transition. The NiCE CXone experts helped us with all that. I have nothing but high praise for NiCE CXone and its ability to future-proof our global contact center operations.”

“Integrated omnichannel is much more efficient, scalable, flexible and dynamic than multichannel. Our agent utilization has jumped 20% since using CXone Omnichannel.”

John Zurn

Senior Director
Global Reservations and Customer Care
Radisson Hotel Group