Why 35,000 calls a day don't have to be a problem

A thunderstorm that lasted the entire weekend, with storms and heavy rain, kept the R+V Service Center busy on Monday, September 19, 2011. And on the very first day after the new contact center platform went live. But the Voxtron Communication Center coped with the onslaught. This day marked the completion and successful test of a project that crossed the finish line in just eight months: The development of a new company-wide contact center platform based on Voxtron Communication Center software. R+V overall project manager Ingo Müller and his team of system specialists and project managers were able to meet all project milestones from the kick-off workshop to the go-live. “I still remember the planning and implementation of the old infrastructure very well. It took two years,” explains Ingo Müller. “The fact that the manufacturer would no longer support it after just five years of operation put us under enormous pressure to act.”

Based on the findings from the past, the choice fell on a competent system integrator. In the previous proof of concept, IP Dynamics impressed with its high level of expertise, commitment and close cooperation with the manufacturer Voxtron. Added to this was the system integrator's experience in carrying out load tests, which reinforced the confidence in a reliable project implementation. With the help of these load tests, IP Dynamics puts contact center platforms, the surrounding IT infrastructure and all integration interfaces through their paces in order to guarantee a reliable live connection. Every day, R+V Versicherung receives between 30,000 and 35,000 calls at two Wiesbaden locations as well as in Karlsruhe, Münster and Hamburg, which are distributed to around 800 service center workstations. The highly available Voxtron Communication Center is set up centrally in the insurer's Wiesbaden data center. It implements cross-location call distribution for the various clients and their more than 150 service numbers. For this purpose, it controls the redundantly designed Voxtron Media Gateways, which are connected to the local telephone systems at the individual locations via IP. The technical system monitoring of this complex IT and telecommunications infrastructure is carried out both locally and remotely via a comprehensive system with alarms, warnings and status messages based on Nagios software. In addition to call routing, the service center of Condor Lebensversicherung AG, a company of the R+V Group, uses the Voxtron Communication Center at its Hamburg location to distribute e-mails and faxes to its employees. In 2012, the central R+V Service Center will also use the multi-channel capability of the Voxtron Communication Center to distribute e-mails, faxes and letters. The plan is to use this technology in the composite for further operational functions. The Voxtron Communication Center can be designed for high availability and allows the use of modern standard technologies. In consultation with R+V, IP Dynamics decided to set up the central hardware platform on IBM Blade Center technology and NetApp MetroCluster. In addition, those responsible opted for virtualized ESX servers in combination with Microsoft 64-bit operating systems (Windows 2008 Server) and databases (SQL Server 2008). This combination of software and hardware ensures the highest possible availability. During the short project duration, the central contract and telephony application of the R+V Service Center, the Lotus Notes-based CRM application of the Condor Service Center and the HPSC/IPC application of the insurer's central user service had to be integrated into the Voxtron Communication Center. In addition, IP Dynamics made it possible for R+V employees to manage without a telephony client. The employees can also control their call center activities via their existing system telephone.

Team leaders and administrators operate the entire contact center system themselves, from creating and managing users to setting opening hours, announcements and rule-based functions to database queries in the integrated voice portal. Live operation with all the associated information traditionally plays a special role at R+V. The system integrator therefore provided a web-based real-time monitoring system that meets the diverse requirements of a wide range of user groups. At Voxtron, real-time monitoring means that the update interval is less than one second. The wishes of the individual clients were implemented in the historical reporting - in addition to Crystal Reports and evaluations in Microsoft SQL Server, the existing reporting with Microsoft Office interfaces is also seamlessly reused.