The Mission
Hoepers wanted to deploy new contact center platforms with advanced technology. It also sought to increase the dialing assertiveness and efficiency of its customer service staff, manage its daily campaigns better and more easily, and provide clients with more complex services. The Brazilian collection agency also wanted to accomplish all of this while preserving its investment in legacy equipment and avoiding disruptions to its business during the implementation.
Hoepers is one of the largest collection agencies in Brazil. Over the past few years its business has grown, driven by the acquisition of new clients and by the large increase of credit supply in the country. In 2010, after six months of intensive evaluation of communications solutions, Hoepers turned to Avaya and its partner DDS Telecomunicações.
The project involved the replacement of Hoepers’ legacy dialing platform with a predictive outbound dialer, full integration of Avaya solutions with software already in use, installation of a hybrid communications network, adoption of IP extensions, and the modernization of the entire communications network in the company’s headquarters to enable the use of VoIP.
What Hoepers expected to gain from new tools and next-generation hardware was the ability to make more calls of higher quality, faster. “We opted for Avaya because of their highly representative participation in contact center solutions,” says Viviane Bianchi, IT Superintendent at Hoepers and the manager of the project.
Teamwork and Expertise
The partnership turned out to be an extremely successful one. The first phase included a complete validation of Hoepers’ physical environment. This effort led to the installation at the headquarters and the new building next door—as well as the units in Canoas and Maracanaú—of gateways that enable the creation of hybrid networks suitable for analog, digital, or IP telephony.
The second phase of the project included the integration of the predictive dialer with the platform already in use by the company, with the goal of uniting the best of the tools offered by Avaya with the advantages of customer relationship management (CRM) software already in use by Hoepers to preserve the company’s vast expertise in credit recovery. “The integration was the most difficult step of the project, but the willingness to customize the technology, shown both by Hoepers and the Avaya and DDS teams, was the key,” says Bianchi.
During the third phase of the project, the team replaced the legacy platform, used for over five years by Hoepers in Canoas, with an Avaya Proactive Contact predictive dialer. During this phase, a major challenge was keeping the unit operational at all times during the transition. “The project was successful, thanks to the constant dedication of the DDS and Hoepers teams,” says Mauro Fernando Souza, Commercial Manager at DDS.
More Productivity
Of the total active calls carried out by Hoepers’ staff, the number of daily calls per operator increased by about 30 percent—without the company having to hire any more employees. The increase is the result of predictive dialing, which eliminates the waiting time between calls.
Stronger Assertiveness
The number of promises to pay (achieved by negotiating with delinquent debtors and setting a date for payment) increased by approximately 20 percent as the result of better call assertiveness, which Hoepers accomplished by customizing the Avaya dialer. In addition, by uniting Hoepers’ credit recovery expertise with Avaya’s tools, the company has built strategies to optimize recovery. For example, it can determine the frequency and time of calls to be made to residential, commercial, or mobile phones.
Fewer Idle Hours
Before installing the Avaya dialer, the company had staff fully dedicated to receiving calls, but a part of their time was idle. Now, with the use of inbound and outbound call blending, the staff allocated to inbound calls can make outbound calls during their idle time.
Agile Management of Everyday Activities
Hoepers plans campaigns on a daily basis; specifying, for instance, the mailing that will be triggered in connection with the assets to be collected on behalf of each of the client companies. Before the partnership with Avaya, the company’s supervisors had to engage the company’s development division in order to alter the campaigns during the day. Now this is not necessary because the Avaya dialer enables supervisors to manage mailing immediately and directly.
Products
Avaya Proactive Contact, Avaya Voice Portal 5.0, Avaya Call Management System, Avaya Aura® Communication Manager, G450 Media Gateways
Competitive Advantage
The implementation team installed Avaya Proactive Contact dialers and the Avaya Voice Portal platform in the contact center and implemented the Avaya Call Management System for management, a solution fully integrated with the collection management software developed by Hoepers and running on Linux.
With this kind of increased productivity, Hoepers can contact a much larger number of clients per day and increase the volume of services provided to each client. Improvements like this, enabled by the Avaya solutions, put Hoepers in second place in the performance ranking for the Canoas market segment shortly after the first month of deployment.
Benefits
30 percent increase in the number of successful calls
20 percent increase in the number of promises to pay by debtors
Better use of staff resources