Cover Story
Make the call
Credit union dials into hosted service
Headquartered in Wichita Falls, Texas, Union
Square Federal Credit Union relies heavily
on technology to compete with banks and
other financial services providers located
within its field of membership. When it
needed a new voice communications solution,
Joe Mannion, manager of information
services, sought a next-generation solution
that could deliver a number of productivity
and efficiency tools for a multitude of
purposes–with improving organizational
continuity and enhancing member service at
the top of the list.
"Just like anywhere else in the country,
our organization is constantly competing
with local and regional banks and other
lending institutions for members," explains
Mannion. "One way in which Union Square has
responded to this competition is employing
advanced technology to help serve our
members efficiently, conveniently and more
securely. For example, we will be deploying
a sophisticated mobile banking solution to
complement our current online banking
program, similar to ones found in large
commercial banks."
Union Square provides a comprehensive
range of banking and other financial
services to its membership throughout the
Wichita Falls and north Texas region. With
four locations, including a branch at
Sheppard Air Force Base, Union Square serves
a mix of Air Force personnel and their
families, local businesses, and residents of
Wichita County.
"With over 100 employees spread out over
several locations, streamlining
communications with our legacy PBX was a
challenge," says Mannion. "In the past,
transferring calls between locations was a
process that resulted in slow response time
to members and inefficient use of our
staff’s time. Since we knew that the
networking efficiencies through
voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology would go a
long way in rectifying this situation, and
provide benefits for future expansion, we
embarked on a process to identify the
solution that would best serve our needs."
From a feature and functionality
standpoint, the credit union wanted a
platform that offered a full range of
advanced applications, such as unified
communications and collaboration tools. It
also sought robust contact center
capabilities to help improve the efficiency
of Union Square’s member support agents.
In addition, the credit union needed a
solution that was easy to manage. Intuitive
self-administration and network-management
tools were considered a plus for Union
Square’s IT team, who routinely change or
add users to the network.
Lastly, the credit union required a
calculable return on its investment. Before
investing a dime in new technology, Union
Square management needed to understand
precisely how the new system would improve
the organization from a revenue, operation
and expenditure perspective.
Union Square finally decided on a managed
services program from Mitel. "Once we
performed our due diligence on the Mitel
technology and ran the numbers, it was an
obvious choice," says Mannion.
The core of the solution is built around
several Mitel IP communications platforms
networked together over Union Square’s
existing IP network that support some 100 IP
phones and soft phones.
"Security and reliability are of
paramount importance to us, and the Mitel
platforms rate extremely high in this
regard," he adds. "In addition, we can
easily add users or change users within the
system whenever we need to, which helps us
maintain a high level of efficiency."
With the backbone in place, Union Square
elected to deploy several Mitel applications
to further improve its operational
performance. One of the challenges it needed
to address was the productivity of its
contact center. In the past, Union Square’s
member service staff was at the mercy of its
legacy technology. Transferring calls
between agents and between locations was
often hit or miss.
One of the most important elements in the
solution, Mannion explains, is Mitel’s
Contact Center Suite, a customer-interaction
management tool that enables Union Square to
gain consistent visibility into the
performance of its contact center. The
application allows managers to, through a
number of visual graphics, obtain
productivity metrics, such as agent response
time, calls in queue and number of agents
available. These measurements give managers
the ability to better assess their staff,
and shift resources during peak times.
"We’re finding Contact Center Suite to be
a valuable asset," says Mannion. "We’ve had
staff members in remote locations log into
the system during high-traffic hours to help
out as customer service representatives. In
addition, we’re now able to link Contact
Center Suite with our internal member
database. This allows our agents to retrieve
pertinent account information quickly
whenever a member calls into our center."
In addition to its customer interaction
software, Union Square utilizes Mitel’s
IP-powered application Unified Communicator.
Providing presence management and
call-routing capabilities, Unified
Communicator allows Union Square’s executive
team to receive incoming calls at a single
phone number, regardless of their location.
The application allows users to direct
incoming calls to the most appropriate
location, including team members, remote
locations, voice mail and mobile phones.
"From an operational standpoint, Unified
Communicator streamlines our ability to
interact with members, who know they can
reach their intended party through a single
phone number," states Mannion. "This greatly
enhances the service we deliver to our
members by allowing us to be more productive
and responsive, even when working remotely."
Union Square still needed reassurance,
however, that the Mitel solution was the
best choice from a return-on-investment and
cost-benefit perspective. Through Mitel’s
managed services program, the credit union
does not have to make any capital investment
to leverage the technology, including
hardware, software, applications,
maintenance, training, carrier services and
data infrastructure. Instead, the
organization pays a fixed, monthly fee.
"When we examined the numbers, the value
of the Mitel solution far surpassed what we
were proposed by other leading PBX
manufacturers," says Mannion. "We’re
estimating that we will save in the
neighborhood of $5,000 per month compared to
traditional purchase options. It’s given us
the ability to leverage an advanced
communications platform that will serve our
needs well into the future. Plus, it’s
allowed us to become more productive and
efficient, and most importantly, we are much
more responsive to our members’ needs."
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Software firm calls for in-house system
When Aspect Software was going through an
aggressive growth period, it initiated a
re-examination of its facilities in the
greater Boston area. This resulted in a plan
to relocate its executive staff and other
employees from a number of smaller
facilities to a new state-of-the art
corporate headquarters in Chelmsford, Mass.
As with planning any move, this entailed a
number of logistical, practical and
technological steps.
As communication is a vital part of
Aspect Software’s products and business, the
search for a complete telephony
infrastructure serving all company IT
requirements was initiated and evaluated by
the IT department.
Aspect Software is one of the world’s
largest companies focused solely on Internet
protocol (IP) and traditional voice-based
contact center products and services.
Privately held, Aspect Software has a
customer base of more than 5,000 in-house
and outsourced global sites managing
customer service, collections, sales and
telemarketing business processes. The
company employs more than 2,000 people
worldwide, with operations in the Americas,
Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia
Pacific.
"It was important to consider if we
should relocate the existing telephony
equipment or rather purchase new equipment
from a traditional equipment provider and
look at various alternatives," says Jamie
Ryan, chief information officer at Aspect
Software.
A number of elements needed to be taken
into account in selecting the correct
telephony system. To help with the process,
Ryan and his team identified a list of
specifications for the new communications
solution: relocate more than 270 employees,
34 remote voice mail-only users, 14 fax
machines, 36 conference room and executive
office phones, 38 general access area
phones, four receptionist/assistant
expansion phones and more than 100 contact
center agents. In addition, the cost of the
system needed to be minimized, while
avoiding any expensive or specialized wiring
and ensuring high availability with
redundancy.
Following an in-depth search, Ryan and
the IT team chose to design and build a
solution based on Digium Asterisk Business
Edition IP PBX, Polycom IP phones and
AudioCodes media gateways. All the devices
in the solution were selected to provide
high voice quality, standard interfaces,
compatibility and reliability.
To ensure the highest reliability, the
resulting system was designed using a fully
redundant and load-balanced architecture,
leveraging the following components:
dual load-balanced Asterisk Business
Edition servers, which provide the IP PBX
call control and other telephony
applications, including auto-attendant and
voice mail;
AudioCodes Mediant media gateways to
facilitate the interface to the PSTN via T-1
circuits using primary rate interface
signaling, while the interface to the
Asterisk servers is accomplished via session
initiation protocol (SIP);
Polycom IP-430 IP phones for the
users’ desktops and an IP-601 with side-cars
were selected for the operator/attendant
positions;
analog conference phones and other
legacy devices connect to the solution using
AudioCodes MediaPack FXS gateways; and
to support Aspect’s customer contact
center, an interface to the company’s Aspect
Unified IP was also developed by the product
development team.
Aspect Software chose to
design and build a solution based on Digium
Asterisk Business Edition IP PBX, Polycom IP
phones and AudioCodes media gateways.
A redundant and load-balanced
architecture was utilized as an inexpensive
and effective way to improve reliability
without expensive specialized hardware or
clustering middleware software. In normal
operating mode, each of the dual servers and
gateways support roughly half of the
organization. In the case of a failure in
any part of one-half of the system, the
other half will step in and support the
entire organization.
Configuration, dial plan and status
synchronization between the two servers is
accomplished with Digium’s DUNDE protocol
and server clustering techniques that are
included in the Linux operating system. In
case of a server failure, the AudioCodes
Mediant gateways detect the failure and then
reroute traffic using rules set in the
backup proxy tables.
The IT department went through the
company’s usual due diligence process,
including a review of the company’s
infrastructure and how the solution would
integrate with the company’s unified contact
center solution, Aspect Unified IP, which
provides automatic call distributor, voice
portal, dialer, recording and
quality-management capabilities.
Following that evaluation, the IT team
developed a deployment plan to ensure there
would be no downtime in the company’s
contact center and throughout the operation.
Aspect Software also created a process to
easily transfer the infrastructure from its
old location to its new destination,
enabling a smooth transition for the contact
center. Based on the evaluation and the
processes developed to ensure a seamless
move, the decision to go with an open source
and VoIP-based infrastructure was approved.
"Basing our solution on AudioCodes,
Polycom and Digium, coupled with Aspect’s
Unified IP, was the right decision for our
new headquarters," says Ryan. "The
deployment cost less than bids by other
vendors, and it was highly and easily
customizable. The implementation was easy
and the quality of the calls has been great.
"By deploying a SIP-based and
best-of-breed open-source solution, we were
able to achieve high voice quality, standard
interfaces, compatibility and reliability,"
Ryan adds.
The company has since incorporated Aspect
Unified IP with the Asterisk Business
Edition open source IP PBX, AudioCodes media
gateways, and Polycom IP phones as it moved
to a new office in San Jose, Calif., and is
looking to continue with this trend for
future office relocations or openings, Ryan
says.
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