Mazda North American Operations needed to migrate their contact centre agents away from an outdated legacy call centre and telephony systems. They choose to take advantage of the latest cloud call centre and telephony solutions. This move was originally intended to include the call centres that weren’t integrated with the automotive manufacturer’s CRM system. However, the area of scope was extended during the course of the project to include them and deliver additional results.
This case study has been created directly from an interview with Deidre Baggett, Project Manager IT Support, Mazda North American Operations.
Challenge
Mazda had previously outsourced their call centre infrastructure and was able to achieve major cost savings and increase their customer experience by moving to the cloud-based solution.
The transition was completed in two stages. First, they moved their phone system to Teams Dialling. Then, they needed to follow suit by migrating their contact centre IVR’s.
“I created a 5-year plan for our telecoms, part of it was to bring our call centre infrastructure back in-house to help control cost and performance.” Deidre Baggett, Business Systems Analyst, Mazda North American Operations
Having done their homework thoroughly, Mazda started looking for a solution that would replicate all the features of their current contact centres. The timelines involved were extremely tight due to a hard contract end date with the existing service. The new Microsoft Teams contact centre simply had to be in place by then or else Mazda would be cut adrift from their customers. That kind of challenge certainly focuses the thinking!
Solution
Mazda had already implemented Teams and subsequently implemented Teams Dialing to satisfy the voice telephony Cloud solution requirement. It was obvious that a Teams Dialing integrated solution was the correct choice to satisfy the requirement of a Teams-certified Contact Centre. That left them needing to select a vendor and a delivery and support partner based on their capabilities. They chose Anywhere 365 based on their advanced feature set and their full use of existing Microsoft 365 capabilities and Resonate due to their technical expertise and highly-qualified team.
“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.” Deidre Baggett, Project Manager IT Support, Mazda North American Operations
Mazda needed a solution that delivered like-for-like capabilities from day one, in addition, they needed to determine if and how their legacy CRM could be integrated. Lastly, they wanted to ensure that they would have the opportunity to add digital omnichannel features in the future.
Anywhere365 was selected as the best option from a feature perspective, as well as the opportunity to utilize the wider investment that Mazda had already made in the 0365 suite. This choice meant that the data would all be held internally on SharePoint and Mazda could use tools like Power BI for useful data analysis.
Despite reservations about going with an Anywhere365 partner, rather than direct, Mazda found that the experience of working with Resonate exceeded all their expectations. It certainly helped that the Resonate Delivery Team had a strong technical background. So strong were the features unlocked by Anywhere 365’s Dialogue Studio tool and Resonate’s expertise, that in the project phase, they were able to increase the scope of the project to include integration with their legacy on-premises CRM, bringing even more agents online -knowledgeable staff were able to problem solve ‘in project’ and successfully design the perfect solution that integrated legacy CRM.
Results
- The net savings of implementing the new solution has been an incredible $1.8M USD. These savings have been made by terminating the original contract with an outsourced provider, along with retiring the legacy contact centre equipment.
- The customer experience has improved beyond recognition by moving to a more ‘human’ model. Knowledgeable internal staff working within Teams can offer customers a range of seamless digital contact options.
- There is scope for further improvement with the immediate opportunity to enhance capabilities around omnichannel and voice recognition.
“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, are A-Team all the way. They were such a pleasure to work with.” Deidre Baggett, Project Manager IT Support, Mazda North American Operations
