Pro BTP – Develops Comprehensive Call Center Solution with IBM and Red Hat

PRO BTP offers auto, home and life insurance, health services, leisure and social activities, and product savings for its three million members. It employs almost 4,000 people and generates annual revenue of euro4.7 million in retirement services, euro1.5 million in health services and euro240 million in insurance and financial products. It is a nonprofit organization controlled by AGIRC/ARRCO (a French organization of employers) and employees.

To better serve its members, PRO BTP needed to improve the quality of its call answering service. Because member call traffic has increased from year to year and is expected to continue increasing, PRO BTP also wanted to find a solution that would reduce its communication costs.

Working with IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services, PRO BTP implemented a solution that aligned three call centers, unifying call answering among the centers. The IBM team compared the best Internet Protocol (IP) solution manufacturers, including Cisco, Avaya and Alcatel, and considered the different returns on investment (ROIs), architectures and migration plans before selecting the Avaya infrastructure.

The new call center solution infrastructure is built using Avaya Text over IP (ToIP) and Voice over IP (VoIP) products, including Avaya Convergence Solutions, Avaya Multimedia Contact Center Solutions, Avaya Self-Service Solutions, Avaya Telephony, Avaya Unified Communications and Avaya Virtual Contact Center Solutions. The solution is integrated into phones deployed at PRO BTP agencies and at the call center sites. The IBM team provided both the hardware and the software, deployed the solution and provided maintenance services. A Business Continuity and Recovery Services plan is included in the solution; if one of the three call centers fails, the other two facilitate business continuity.

Using the new solution, member information is automatically displayed at each of three call centers, meaning that service at each begins with a uniform knowledge of the customer. Additionally, the IP-based solution enables member callers to automatically connect with available call center employees skilled in the caller’s particular field of inquiry.

The solution runs on a reliable, scalable IBM BladeCenter HS20 platform, housed in IBM BladeCenter (Chassis) and running the Red Hat Linux operating system.

With the new solution, 90% of the 5.5 million incoming calls per year are answered in three or fewer rings, dramatically improving the quality of PRO BTP’s call answering service.

By engaging IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services, PRO BTP has realized a secure and highly available ToIP and VoIP infrastructure in its call centers. The new environment has resulted in reduced telecommunication expenses. And the real-time information available as a result of the new infrastructure has highlighted the impact of call center service on sales, with sales increasing by up to 20 percent.