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Contents 
Introduction
Data#3
Toyota Financial Services
NRMA
Inchcape
Executive summary |
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Moving to a new head office building provided Toyota Financial Services with a spur to switch from traditional telephony to VoIP.
As is often the case, adds, moves, and changes were a problem with the old system, but the company realised the simplified cabling alone would reduce the cost of fitting out the new premises by AU$80,000.
Mark Gosling, technical services manager, says the original plan was to install VoIP only at the head office, avoiding a "big bang" implementation. The voice quality was well accepted, the cost savings were significant, and the potential for application integration was apparent, so within three weeks of opening the new head office in October 2004 the VoIP installation was extended to Townsville. By February 2005, all Toyota Financial Services locations -- Sydney (two), Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, and Townsville -- were using VoIP.
The company runs call centres with approximately 100 agents spread across various locations covering sales (Sydney), customer service (Adelaide), collections (Brisbane and Perth, to ensure all day coverage regardless of time zone), the fleet business (Melbourne), and IT help desk (Sydney, serving staff and dealers).
Prior to the VoIP implementation, Toyota Financial Services used Telstra's interactive voice response (IVR) service to direct incoming calls according to their purpose to a hunt group serving the corresponding location. There was no integration between telephony and the call centre software. Now, Telstra directs incoming calls to the closest Toyota Financial Services location. From there they are routed across the company's IP network to an IVR server in Sydney, which obtains the contract number and determines the purpose of the call, then passes it to an agent at the appropriate location. Once that hand-off occurs, the voice traffic travels directly from the answering point to the agent: it does not loop through Sydney. Combined with "free" inter-office calls, this has reduced Toyota Financial Services' phone bill by 25 to 27 percent.
| "The voice system is now a bunch of servers." Mark Gosling, Toyota Financial Services |
While similar integration is possible with conventional telephony, the diversity of old equipment made it difficult. Having a consistent environment across the whole company means any integration only needs to be done once.
The new centralised reporting also allows managers and team leaders to see activity across the entire virtual call centre, allowing performance comparisons.
Cisco CallManager was implemented by IBM Global Services, while Touchbase looked after the Genesys/CallManager integration. Toyota Financial Services' internal development team worked on the IVR/Onyx integration. That task was straightforward, according to Gosling, as it simply means passing the contract number to Onyx as part of a URL. This was easy for developers to understand and they didn't need to learn a new technology, he says.
VoIP also provides greater resilience. A disaster recovery site has been set up, and functions can individually fail-over. "The voice system is now a bunch of servers," says Gosling.
Employees outside the call centres get the benefit of extension mobility: their extension number is mapped to their softphones as part of the network login process.
Outbound calling could take advantage of integration between the CRM system and telephony -- to automate dialling, for example -- but Gosling says the low volume of collections activity means it isn't worth the implementation effort. However, it is much easier and cheaper to add features to VoIP based systems, he says.
The company has no firm plans for further development at this stage, but one possibility under consideration is to extend the use of interactive voice response to allow customers to order new payment books without involving an agent. Gosling says the new platform provides the flexibility to respond to requests from business groups.
That flexibility also removes the need to restrict particular call centre groups to particular locations. There's nothing stopping a fleet agent working at the Perth office or even remotely. The system has been proven to work successfully over a home ADSL connection, and while that will initially be used by senior staff requiring out of hours access or in disaster recovery situations, the company is exploring "fluffy slippers operation" (ie, telecommuting).
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