Addressing the Achilles’ Heel

Avaya designed a stateof-the-art contact center solution for Bhutan Telecom to address inefficiency, human errors, customer experience, and manage the constantly growing subscriber base

Acontact center or the customers’ first touch point plays a powerful role in making or breaking enterprise-customer relationships. Customer loyalty and company’s brand image are directly related to the way the contact center serves its customers. The all-inclusive solutions for contact centers are ideal for different business processes such as customer support, telemarketing and sales, collections, technical support, marketing research, and help desk.

The Need of the Hour

When it comes to telecom operators, this solution becomes even more critical. How critical it was for Bhutan Telecom (BT), which is the biggest service provider operating in Bhutan with a mobile subscriber base close to 3,34,933 and fixed line subscriber base of 27,592 (BICMA statistics September 2011) currently, when the company realized the need of a ‘state-ofthe-art’ single platform contact center solution to manage company’s growing customer base and crippling processes of managing operator’s growth. Let’s unfold BT’S casebook and see how Avaya came to rescue BT’S old-age customer manage-

The BT Case Unfolded

ment processes from crashing—by giving a tinge of technology and revamping the company’s contact center processes. Bhutan Telecom (BT), one of the major corporations in Bhutan, is fully owned by the government. BT is the only service provider, which is providing fixed phone services as well in the state apart from cellular (GPRS/EDGE, 3G) and broadband (dial up/leased line). Looking at the company’s ever-expanding subscriber base and upcoming expansion plans, upgradation of the back-end process and customer contact system becomes the need of the hour.

Druk Holding & Investments (DHI), BT’S holding company, which also has 16 other companies under it. While the companies have customers ranging between thousands and lakhs, they lacked proper call center or service center facilities/infrastructures; in fact, at BT, each call agent/help desk agent maintains a log file (a physical register) to maintain all call reports.

Tshering Norbu, general manager, ISP division, Druknet, Bhutan Telecom explains, “None of the five corporations had a proper call center solution. Every call was logged manually. Some companies had in-house developed applications to address only specific calls and not all.” This process was quite tedious and prone to errors. Therefore BT wanted to address all these issues and identified the need to put in place a call center individually for each company, on a single platform, and catering to the five large companies under DHI.

Hence BT started evaluating all call center vendors. In the middle of 2010, the process of vendor evaluation started, and it was determined that Avaya is the market leader and best suited to address its concerns.

Engagement with Avaya

Anil Chawla, director, enterprise, government, and defense, Avaya India says, “The BT team also visited Avaya’s labs and met our long-standing customers ranging from service providers, banks, travel and tourism industry, BPOS, and power companies, while they were evaluating for vendor engagement.”

Towards the end of 2010, the engagement commenced. Avaya with its next-generation of contact center solu-