Gaz de France Prepares for Competition with a CosmoCall Universe™ Contact Center

View PDF version

National Energy Utility Consolidates Legacy Call Centers

Gaz de France and Electric de France together comprised the National French Utility Group, a major European energy supplier producing, distributing, and selling gas and electricity to homes, businesses, and government agencies. They shared 96 regional call centers. When the group was reorganized and the market opened to competition, Gaz de France became a separate, public enterprise with 1,800 customer service agents at 32 call centers located throughout France.

Competition Changes the Business Environment

Gaz de France recognized that opening the gas market to competition would bring major changes to its business. To prosper and grow in a competitive environment, Gaz de France decided to emphasize the quality and effectiveness of customer care at all of its call centers. It also recognized its need for flexibility in the locations, capacities, and functions of is call centers, and efficiency in its use of agents and other resources to minimize costs.

Each of Gaz de France’s 32 call centers was a separate entity with its own ACD and other systems. Each call center was integrated in its own way to one internally developed legacy CRM for residential customers, and another CRM for business customers. Each center had its own telephone number and handled only calls for its own local area. The cost of maintaining so many separate and different systems was high. There were no consistent performance or management reports. Gaz de France needed to unify its operation, administration, and reporting across these widely distributed operations. It also needed one consistent integration with a common set of business applications. Gaz de France had limited time to implement these enhancements before the arrival of competition.

Consolidating all Contact Centers on a Single Hosted Platform

To meet these challenges and achieve its goals, Gaz de France consolidated all of its call centers onto a single CosmoCall Universe platform, creating a virtual contact center that operates as one unified system across all locations. Now callers are quickly connected with the first available agent at any of Gaz de France’s call center locations, and agents are empowered with access to all of the customer account information they need to achieve first call resolution and high customer satisfaction.

The complete solution includes SAP and legacy CRMs, all integrated consistently with CosmoCall Universe for all agents and sites. A Cisco Call Manager (CCM) IP PBX provides for Gaz de France’s enterprise telephony needs, and CosmoCom’s CCM integration enables call center agents to use the Cisco telephones. The CCM and CosmoCall Universe interoperate for call control and routing, and calls can be seamlessly transferred between them. Gaz de France engaged a major telecommunications service provider to host within its network a dedicated CosmoCall Universe platform implemented with full redundancy. The hosted solution did not require a large upfront capital expenditure, and eliminated the premise equipment maintenance and support burden, freeing GdF to focus on its customers and its competition.

The selection of CosmoCall Universe was driven by its all-IP, standards-based architecture, its ability to support consolidation, and its ability to meet the already large requirements of GdF with plenty of headroom for its anticipated growth. The CosmoCall Universe unified architecture and advanced integration tools greatly simplified the complex Gaz de France implementation project. Using the CosmoConnector’s APIs, CosmoCom partners Eozen and GFI completed the SAP, Selligent, and challenging legacy CRM integrations in less than 120 days. These integrations work for all agents at all locations and across all communication channels. The Gaz de France contact center project was technology-complete in September 2006, and rolled out to all sites before the July 2007 onset of competition.

Customer Service as a Competitive Advantage

With its call center locations now operating as a single contact center, Gaz de France provides new customer service features and a higher level of service quality. A single queue routes callers to the first available agent regardless of the agent’s location, effectively creating a larger group of agents to take calls. As a result, Gaz de France reduced caller wait times and can handle the increased call volume caused by competition, with no additional agents. It has also reduced costs by improving agent utilization efficiency. In addition, Gaz de France implemented scheduled agent call-backs and outbound Marketing campaigns, and it plans to add email, web chat, web self help, as well as outbound calling for meter reading. It is also considering Text to Speech and agent SMS email notification, both supported by the CosmoCall Universe platform.

Using the web-based administration tools of the hosted CosmoCall Universe platform, Gaz de France now has extensive control over all of its call center locations. It can easily add new agents as well as different agent types, such as home agents. For the first time, Gaz de France centrally manages its operations with uniform performance reports. In addition, its agents are achieving higher first call resolution rates by using both the new SAP CRM and the legacy CRMs to access more comprehensive customer information. Gaz de France will soon consolidate the customer account processing into a single SAP CRM. With the new features, flexibility and enhanced administrative control of its contact center, Gaz de France has both enhanced its customer satisfaction and reduced costs. It is now ready and able meet the competition head on, and win.