Feedback from OVHcloud – Testimony of Stéphanie Jacquet – Head of Contact Center Coordination
In partnership with the AFRC (French Association of Customer Relationship Management), Activeo and Cisco hosted a webinar on Tuesday, June 30, 2020 based on the theme “How to reconcile customer experience, quality of service and employee engagement remotely? ». During this session, Stéphanie Jacquet, Head of Contact Center Coordination gave her feedback on the adaptation of the OVHcloud group to the current health crisis and proposed a focus on the challenges of customer support service.
Founded in 1999, OVHcloud is one of the pioneers in the French alternative cloud and European leader thanks to its 30 data centers, 400,000 servers and 2,200 employees worldwide. The support activity is based on a multi-country and multi-lingual organization with more than 400 employees who work around the clock and help and expertise. The multi-channel contact center platform is based on Cisco technology implemented and maintained by Activeo for several years. Activeo accompanies the evolution and migration plans of the technical perimeter and works closely with OVHcloud teams to satisfy a robust and efficient governance.
Q1. How did you maintain remote service continuity during this period?
(Answer by Stéphanie Jacquet)
Teleworking is a practice already established at OVHCloud with an international agreement in 2019 and implemented since 2018.
Given the geographical coverage, we have taken progressive measures (Italy, the first confined country as early as February) which have allowed us to anticipate the necessary actions in case of need to resort to telework on a massive scale:
- Provision of Equipment
- Sizing the VPN to allow more than 2,000 people to connect simultaneously, compared to 300 previously.
- Installation of remote communication tools. The helpdesk service worked night and day for 10 days, organizing up to 7 conferences every 30 minutes simultaneously to help users install all the necessary software. The priority was to set up teleworking for the teams in direct contact with our customers. In France, the day after the confinement, most employees were able to answer tickets and from Thursday 100% of the flows of the “telephone” channel.
Q2. How can we create customer proximity in the context we encountered?
(Answer by Stéphanie Jacquet)
Special attention was paid by all in order not to take any risk to our employees (in reference to the “symmetry of attentions”) Instantly, we observed an increased attention to the quality of service offered to our customers by our teams.
During this period, our products and services have enabled us to promote several activities:
- e-learning in schools,
- essential services such as firefighters, hospitals to be in contact with users,
- of employees and companies to be able to continue to operate even though they are in their forties.
From this particular attention was born a very nice initiative: Open Solidarity, whose vocation is to provide free solutions for teleworking, collaboration, and health activities. We have made OVHcloud infrastructures available for these solutions free of charge and without any commitment throughout the crisis to support peak loads. The initiative began in France, is now global and continues until mid-September as difficulties continue to arise to better collaborate and catch up on education for example.
We have also proposed additional contact channels such as live chat in Poland for example.
Q3. What consequences has the crisis had on your project roadmap? Has it stimulated and accelerated digitalization?
(Answer by Stéphanie Jacquet)
Within OVHcloud we have various digitization projects in progress.
During the containment, we have accelerated those that required paper handling by our employees on the one hand and the sending of mail by our customers on the other hand to protect everyone and respect the containment. For example, we accelerated the implementation of the electronic signature proposed to our customers in 2 and a half weeks. In addition to these examples, once the teams were safely installed in their homes, with continuity of service guaranteed to our customers, we reviewed our projects. Following this project review, we made the decision to continue the transformation projects (the goal: to improve the customer experience):
- evolution of Customer Service Management tools,
- evolution of the telephony tool: transition from a custom tool to the Cisco UCCE system.
This last UCCE migration project was started a year ago with 2 migrant countries (Poland and Canada).
At the time of COVID, we had to complete the migration of telephony for 5 countries in Europe before the end of April. After a phase of observation of the functioning of the teleworking teams, and in consultation with them and the Activeo teams that accompany us, we decided not to modify our initial plans. We have therefore:
- reviewed the support system before, during and after the migration, but managed to meet our commitments to migrate telephony for nearly 50 employees in Northern and Southern Europe in April.
- launched a new contact channel, live chat in Poland
- we are preparing for the migration of telephony in France in July, when all our teams (over 200 people) will not yet have returned to the premises.
In the end, during this unprecedented period, a major corporate project was orchestrated, allowing us to put to the test a technological and human combination that proved to be winning and sustainable.
