SAP, one of the world’s leading software producers for managing business processes, recently migrated the entire company to Skype for Business. SAP implemented Luware LUCS, a contact center solution built for Skype for Business to reduce on-premises infrastructure demands, free up IT staff and gain efficiencies.
By outsourcing infrastructure upkeep and application maintenance to a hosted partner environment, the SAP IT team responsible for contact center support was able to redefine their role with internal customers. The IT team has regained 20% of their daily work time, which it can now spend on providing strategic, innovation-enabling support. “We don’t spend our resources maintaining the solution anymore and can invest our time into working closely with the business to give them what they need to work smarter,” explains Robert Coomans, Service Manager for Contact Center Technology at SAP.
SAP‘s mission is to enable teams to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. The company, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, employs 85,000 people in 130 countries and serves more than 350,000 customers across 180 countries worldwide.
To serve their customers, SAP runs more than 15 global call centers worldwide to assist internal and external customers. The call center services offer various services, including IT support, financial assistance, and HR services, as well as sales, marketing, and customer service call centers for external customers. The call centers are located in different regions and are managed by separate teams with distinct needs. The number of agents working in a call center varies from five to more than 800. These agents generally have dual roles that require them to split their time between handling calls and performing other office work.
Robert Coomans, the Service Manager for Contact Center Technology at SAP, oversees a team wholly dedicated to keeping all SAP’s call centers up and running. Previously, they only ran SAP contact center software in their on-premises data centers.
In the wake of the company-wide move to Skype for Business, Coomans saw an opportunity to reclaim his team’s time and resources and streamline the call agents’ jobs. By adding the LUCS contact center solution built on Skype for Business, he could outsource infrastructure and app maintenance to their existing telephony partner and enable efficiencies in the daily workflow for call agents by consolidating their dual roles within the Skype for Business client interface.
“Our team spent 20% of each day working on infrastructure and app updates. Moving to LUCS contact center solution freed us up to act more strategically,” said Coomans. LUCS by Luware integrates natively into Skype for Business to enable channel-independent routing of any customer request. Employees love the omnichannel support through Skype for Business and that voice, chat, and desktop sharing are all supported by one client.”
When it came to training, Coomans said, “It proved to be very easy because all of our employees were already familiar with the Skype for Business client, which is all the agent sees for their daily business using LUCS. Similarly, from the IT perspective, the configurator tool is graphical, making it very intuitive to use and understand.”
The internal IT helpdesk has seen a massive ramp-up in IM chats since it added LUCS contact center on Skype for Business. “We underestimated the demand for chat. People love it. When we went live with the solution, we saw rapid growth in chat with the internal helpdesk. Our help desk is currently running over 500 chats daily,” explains Robert Coomans. While only internal users can access IM functionality today, they have been eager to try out the new feature, which has proven to be a vital channel for the international company.
Coomans believes employees may prefer the chat functionality over the phone, as it alleviates language barrier issues. “People tend to like the idea of directly chatting to an agent, partly because their English might not be so good that they’re uncomfortable carrying a conversation over the phone.”
The LUCS contact center built on Skype for Business enables a single channel for providing efficient support. From IM to voice to desktop sharing, LUCS enables agents to transition seamlessly within their client interface to solve their customer’s problems in real time.