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VisitBritain: Promoting Britain to the World

VisitBritain is the national organization that’s responsible for marketing and developing British tourism globally by providing information to potential visitors. It has 21 overseas offices and operates in 36 markets. VisitBritain seized upon the benefits of Consolidation 2.0 by deploying a highly distributed virtual contact center with sites in 13 countries, all of which operate on a single CosmoCall Universe contact center platform. Using a virtual contact center, callers now reach a local agent who speaks their language, while VisitBritain minimizes its global telecommunications costs and maintains a uniformly high level of customer service quality across all sites worldwide.

A Worldwide Local Challenge

To promote and develop tourism, VisitBritain employs marketing tools including published material and web content, and it accepts calls from tourists interested in and planning to visit Britain. But to effectively accomplish its mission, VisitBritain needed a local presence across its 36 worldwide markets. Local agents need to be knowledgeable about the facilities and attractions within the UK, but must also speak English and understand the local culture of their callers. Implementing many separate local call centers seemed technically burdensome and economically unfeasible. A single global call center with local agents and facilities distributed among VisitBritain’s worldwide markets was preferred, but also seemed challenging.

Global call centers evoke the image of a large multi-national company operating numerous large sites with heavy investments in local infrastructure, and with a complex pre-routing facility operated by a global Service Provider distributing the calls between the sites. How could VisitBritain, with many relatively small sites accomplish this cost effectively and manage all of its sites to insure a uniform, high quality of customer service?

The Solution:
A CosmoCall Universe Virtual Contact Center Platform

VisitBritain’s solution was to utilize CosmoCall Universe™, an IP based Virtual Contact Center that’s designed to economically consolidate widely distributed agents and sites, both large and small, into a single unified customer communications platform. With CosmoCall Universe, VisitBritain created a true global call center that is both local and central at the same time. It also allowed VisitBritain to preserve and leverage the investment it had already made in a global MPLS network and VoIP technology.

To date VisitBritain has implemented its virtual global contact center with sites at the following locations:

Using the Consolidation 2.0 strategy supported by the CosmoCall Universe platform, the agency’s call center managers have full visibility of the operation of all sites and all agents worldwide. A manager can easily monitor agents, assess loads and performance, and respond as needed to maintain high service quality throughout.

The implementation of VisitBritain’s highly distributed global contact system was smooth and effective. The core CosmoCall Universe system (ACD, databases, etc.) was installed in London, and a CosmoCall Universe Voice Connection Server (VCS) was installed at each of the 13 remote locations. This configuration allows tourists to make local calls to the nearest VCS, significantly reducing VisitBritain’s telecoms costs. When a tourist calls and an appropriate agent becomes available, the caller is routed to that agent and connected. The ACD that routes the call to the appropriate agent is located in London, but a call in Hong Kong, for example, remains a local call. An agent local to the original call is usually preferred. But the virtual nature of the system makes it possible for any agent, anywhere in the world, to accept the call, which is transmitted at low cost in IP form using VisitBritain’s MPLS network.

The local VCS also provides IVR support and provides information that can be used to route calls to the best possible agent in any location. For example, a potential tourist calling from Belgium will be greeted by the local IVR that will ask the caller his/her preferred language. If the caller chooses French, the call will be transferred to Paris, if Flemish, to Amsterdam, and if English, to London. This is all done in the IP domain, using the MPLS network to minimize the cost.

Results: Cost Effective, Highly Distributed Local Customer Service

The VisitBritain contact center deployment demonstrates that with a CosmoCom Consolidation 2.0 solution, a globally distributed Virtual Contact Center with many individual sites is feasible, easy to manage and cost effective. It dispels the notion that global contact centers are only practical for large enterprises with large contact center sites. In fact, this virtual global architecture is feasible for any number of sites and for any mix of large and small sizes.

The CosmoCall Universe platform architecture also provides a high degree of flexibility to meet the challenges of each customer’s specific requirements. In the case of VisitBritain, their deployment exemplifies the strategy of distributing the VCSs among the different sites, a simple and cost effective way to reduce telecoms costs. A CosmoCall Universe system can include any number of VCS elements in any location. For VisitBritain, each VCS provides a local point of presence within the single global system. CosmoCall Universe provides the same flexibility for altering the system configuration and operation as an enterprise’s business environment changes. In fact, following its successful contact center implementation and ongoing operation, VisitBritain is now considering its next step: using home-based agents, who can simply be plugged into the CosmoCall Universe architecture with no changes to the system.