Ipsos.
Ipsos right-sizes telephony system with Genesys Cloud for cost and operational benefits.
As a global market research and consulting firm that provides information and data analysis on people, brands, markets, and society, Ipsos relies on its telephony system to deliver its audience measurement, media development, and customer experience services.
“Since the 1960s, Ipsos has worked with public and private sector companies in the UK conducting political polling and research,” explains Jack Goode, IT Service Delivery Manager, UK & Ireland at Ipsos.
“We rely heavily on our telephony system to communicate with clients and perform daily business tasks, as well as conduct interviews and enable respondents to interact with surveys.”
The business need.
Ipsos operated on a standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) across two carriers to make voice calls over the Internet.
The company operated an on-premise Avaya PBX and Session Border Controller (SBC) support, supplying two sites in London, one in Belfast and another in Edinburgh. Ipsos also operates two contact centres and an internal IT help desk.
“As this on-premise legacy telephony system aged, it became dated, which made it difficult for us to manage and innovate,” elaborates Goode.
“The solution we had in place lacked features and no longer provided the full utility end-users needed.”
For example, usage monitoring and call recordings were add-on features that Ipsos could not access or were not within budget which meant it needed to integrate third-party solutions.
“The user experience was also complicated. Simple end-user functions like accessing voicemails and making calls were not intuitive, requiring a lot of training for agents,” continues Goode.
As an on-premise solution, the telephony system was impacted during routine building power-downs and outages, which meant the Ipsos team needed to plan and communicate to staff ahead of time.
“As our services provider, Connect helped us manage the system during downtime, but the process was onerous and cumbersome, requiring testing before an outage and system realignment before flipping back from secondary to primary services,” elaborates Goode.
The Ipsos team also regularly contacted Connect with numerous other queries, relying heavily on their partner to maintain system uptime and quality of service.
“We wanted a solution that was easier to use, and our internal teams could support to remove some of the dependency on our solutions partner,” adds Goode.
We also wanted something that was more resilient and offered more capabilities, like secure call recordings and the ability to manage and share recordings internally.
The solution.
Following a review of the requirements, Ipsos determined that a cloud-based telephony and contact centre solution would modernise its operation and address the numerous challenges it faced.
After consulting with the team, we identified that they had over 2,000 Avaya licences, many of which were not being used,
explains Daryl Gould, Account Manager at Connect.
“We also realised that security was a key issue because the Avaya services were running on hardware that needed to be phased out due to a recent change in the law and more restrictive requirements from some of our customers.”
Choosing Genesys Cloud
Based on its analysis, Connect determined that Ipsos needed a secure solution that would reduce costs, create opportunities to access new capabilities and offer greater resilience against outages.
“Connect recommended the Genesys Cloud solution, which presented a strong utility case for us,” continues Goode.
While the migration to cloud services would deliver many advantages, Ipsos was mindful that it also came with a loss of control. “We needed assurances in this regard before going ahead, and those provided by Connect and Genesys met our needs.”
Implementation and migration
The Connect team performed substantial work to prove Genesys could accommodate the services Ipsos needed, with both teams working for 12 months in the background to achieve this alignment.
“For instance, call recording was previously managed by two systems, and we had a structured greeting system that we needed to migrate. We needed to determine that Genesys could support these capabilities,” explains Goode.
The other critical success factor was putting sufficient safeguards in place to ensure recorded calls were only accessible to certain people while meeting compliance requirements regarding geographic storage.
“With the important planning completed and all the checks and balances in place, the migration turned into a sprint,” says Gould.
The team successfully brought together 20 years of legacy telephony systems and turned it into a simpler, consolidated solution in the cloud.
“The migration was smooth and uncomplicated. We did not require huge pivots or big changes during the process,” recalls Goode.
“We migrated all SIP trunks to Gamma, consolidating the system and ceased all services that were not required. We also reduced the network to 30 channels by utilising Session Border Controllers as a Service (SBCaaS) with direct routing to Genesys,” explains Gould.
The resultant reduction in its existing Next Generation Network (NGN) estate meant Ipsos only paid for what it actually wanted and needed.
By moving to Genesys Cloud, Connect aligned licenses with active users, providing 16 Cloud named user licences for the contact centre, and 250 Genesys Cloud Communicate UC (unified communications) licences, giving Ipsos access to IP PBX functionality with auto-attendant tools that make collaboration and communication easier for agents.
“Reducing licenses from 2000 to 250 that we know are definitely being used rationalised costs and improved our ability to manage this aspect of our business,” adds Goode.
“We quickly and easily replicated and implemented existing call flows into the system, and the ease of use was extraordinary. While we put a few resources in place to support end-users, the Genesys solution did not require any explaining.”
Importantly, the security provided by Genesys offered comfort, while the inclusion of call recording on every licence has saved costs by negating the need for a third-party solution.
The outcome.
Since migrating to Genesys Cloud, Goode says the improved system reliability and resilience have been a huge advantage.
“Our systems are far more resilient during planned outages, which has improved business continuity. Moreover, local telephony network issues, which happened periodically in the area, are no longer an issue for us.”
Ipsos has also been able to implement smarter solutions, including automation and more intelligent call flows.
“Following our migration, we have had more interest from the European business to commission more complex call flows, which is something we are planning to do in the near future.”
Ultimately, Goode says the decision to migrate to Genesys Cloud has enabled the operation to scale down and rationalise channels with no change in service.
“The whole project has been a perfect case study for right-sizing a business. With the 90% reduction in licenses, we are getting better value from our IT spend while the cloud-based capabilities mean we are working more efficiently,” concludes Goode.
About‘Connect.
Connect combines global contact centre and customer experience (CX) expertise, deep domain knowledge, and unparalleled industry skills to make the complex, simple. Since 1990, we have leveraged our vendor-independent managed services approach to digitally transform how organisations communicate, both internally and externally. We specialise in combining the most relevant technologies and services from leading vendors and platform providers to create opti-channel engagement solutions, orchestrating frictionless experiences and simplifying complex communication challenges.
Connect with us Connect UK, Connect South Africa, Connect India, Connect USA.
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