Rebecca Gibson |
Established in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1920, Mazda is an international automotive manufacturer that sells a range of cars and engines to customers in nearly 140 countries and regions around the world. Like many organisations, Mazda aims to deliver high-quality customer services and respond to all queries as quickly and efficiently as possible.
For several years, its Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) division relied on legacy telephony systems and contact centre infrastructure managed by an external provider to do this. However, when it began to approach the end of its existing outsourcing contract, MNAO decided to fully replace the legacy systems with a new cloud-based solution so it could move all call centre operations in-house.
“I created a five-year plan for our telecommunications, part of which was to bring our call centre infrastructure back in-house to help control cost and performance,” explains Deidre Baggett, MNAO’s business systems analyst and IT project manager.
MNAO wanted to implement a cloud-based solution that would not only replicate all the features of its existing contact centre infrastructure, but also enable it to integrate its legacy customer relationship management (CRM) platform. In addition, it wanted to be able to add new digital omnichannel features to the solution in the future.
To maximise its existing investments in Microsoft 365, MNAO opted to deploy Anywhere365’s Dialogue Cloud, which was the first contact centre solution to be certified for Microsoft Teams and enables any employee to interact with customers across any channel, from anywhere at any time. MNAO also chose to adopt the Anywhere365 Dialogue Studio, a low-code platform that allows organisations to quickly design, programme and deploy dialogue flows for artificial intelligence-enabled voice bots. The solution facilitates flexible data-driven routing of incoming dialogue flows by surfacing relevant data from the CRM platform.
Anywhere365 recommended that MNAO worked with Resonate, a Microsoft Gold partner and a Partner of Excellence for Anywhere 365, to roll out the platform. Resonate has extensive experience in migrating organisations in multiple industries from legacy voice systems to comprehensive Teams-based communication solutions.
Resonate completed the cloud transition in two stages. First, it moved the phone system to Teams Dialling and then it migrated the contact centre interactive voice response services to the cloud.
Initially, MNAO asked Resonate to only migrate the call centres that were not integrated with its CRM system to Anywhere365’s solution. However, Resonate was able to capitalise on the features unlocked by Dialogue Studio and increase the scope of the project partway through to incorporate MNAO’s legacy on-premises CRM platform into the contact centre solution. This allowed MNAO to bring all contact centres online and empower more agents to personalise and contextualise interactions with customers.
Although Baggett initially had reservations about working with Resonate rather than directly with Anywhere365, the highly qualified team’s technical expertise and problem-solving abilities exceeded all her expectations.
“The model Anywhere365 is using right now is to employ other organisations to help them roll out projects and I got lucky that I got Resonate,” says Baggett. “The team at Resonate deserve a very large amount of praise. Often you get the A-team at the sales stage, the B-team in delivery and the C-team for support. Resonate, however, is A-team all the way and such a pleasure to work with.”
Terminating its contract with the outsourced provider and replacing the legacy contact centre infrastructure with Anywhere365’s solution has enabled MNAO to record net savings of $1.8 million. In addition, MNAO can now automatically store data on Microsoft SharePoint and use tools such as Microsoft Power BI to analyse this data for key insights that can help it to optimise operations.
Adopting Anywhere365’s solution has also allowed the manufacturer to move to a more human-centric operating model and empower in-house employees to reliably deliver a range of digital contact options from within the Teams platform. According to MNAO, this has improved the customer experience “beyond recognition”.
Crucially, MNAO also has scope for further improving the way it manages contact centre operations and customer interactions in future. For example, there is an immediate opportunity to work with Resonate to enhance omnichannel and voice recognition capabilities.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2023 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription