If you didn’t have enough acronyms in your life, WebRTC is making its way IRL ("in real life"). Contact center services provider Intuitive Solutions transitions to software, WebRTC technology from LiveOps and reaps the benefits.
WebRTC has been surrounded by a fair amount of hype – many are talking about it, but who is using it? I had the opportunity to speak with Tory Rutledge, COO of Intuitive Solutions, a provider of managed customer contact services for pizza franchises that include Pizza Hut. Intuitive recently deployed LiveOps WebRTC Solution to help it better provide contact center services to its customers.
Roughly 90% of the work that Intuitive Solutions does for the franchises is taking in-bound calls to pizza outlets, with the remaining 10% being outbound calls to check in with a customer to see if issues have been resolved. Intuitive Solutions' operations have been primarily brick and mortar, but the company recently decided to look for a way to move call center agents to home-based for cost.
Intuitive Solutions looked to LiveOps for its contact center solution that leverages WebRTC technology. The LiveOps WebRTC Solution is a cloud-based contact center that uses a browser to provide all the features you would have with a desktop phone. Being WebRTC-based, the solution doesn't require plug-ins. Additionally, with the use of WebRTC technology, there is no need for other traditional contact center phone system equipment such as on-premises carrier circuits, PBX, desktop phones, internal wiring and other typical requirements.
WebRTC allowed Intuitive to migrate from soft phones to the Web browser for daily agent operations, which was a plus because the regular required software downloads were a source of ongoing management and concern. According to Rutledge, the simplicity of a Web-based solution enabled Intuitive to bring on more customers.
As for how Intuitive dealt with WebRTC not being supported on all browsers, they answered that this hasn't proven to be a major obstacle; WebRTC adoption proved fairly easy since two of the top three browsers (Chrome and Firefox) support WebRTC and have a a large and growing share of the browser market. Intuitive executives also said it is fairly commonplace in organizations today to leverage different desktop applications and browsers for various functions, so even users who primarily use Internet Explorer or Safari likely already had another browser installed on their systems.
"The ability to expand our contact center with at-home agents has been a big win for us in terms of adding additional, on-demand capacity for seasonal business and spikes in customer service requests," Rutledge said. "LiveOps WebRTC Solution enabled us to eliminate not just contact center infrastructure but also the complex and expensive telephony systems. This solution creates a cost-savings opportunity for us and our at-home agents, which we are able to pass on to our customers."
Additionally, on the back end, LiveOps WebRTC Solution provides Intuitive Solutions with robust reporting and scheduling tools. With a better view of agent productivity and reports on call trends, Intuitive also improved employee scheduling and online workforce management.
Because the LiveOps solution encompasses a variety of features, Intuitive was able to cut down the number of business process vendors it used from four to two, now mainly operating off of LiveOps and another solution used to take pizza orders. The recent deployment finally allowed Intuitive to integrate the phone and scheduling systems.
Rutledge emphasized that she did not think the level of growth they've had would be possible without the LiveOps solution. When using traditional telephony, if the company wanted to grow volume, they had to order up additional capacity, which could take up to months. Now if Intuitive Solutions wants to scale up or down depending on fluctuating demand or call volume, it can essentially be done in a matter of minutes.
Overall, Rutledge said that the new system allows them to be much more proactive. Much of the previous system management was based on suspicions rather than hard data, so the new reporting features allow the team to not only catch things quickly, but also pick up on trends and predict outcomes altogether.
