Straumann Enhances Cisco UCC Express Capabilities and Optimizes Contact Center
Performance with VPI’s Cisco Reporting and Workforce Optimization Solution
Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Straumann is a global leader in implant and restorative dentistry and oral
tissue regeneration. In collaboration with leading clinics, research institutes and universities, Straumann
researches, develops and manufactures dental implants, instruments, prosthetics and tissue regeneration
products for use in tooth replacement and restoration solutions or to prevent tooth loss. Straumann products and
services are available in more than 70 countries.
Challenge


Improved efficiency in reporting and
information sharing after the
conversion to Cisco UCC Express
Improved efficiency of quality
assurance processes
Solution Overview
Unified Reporting, Recording, and Quality
Assurance with VPI EMPOWER Suite of
Applications:
 Recording Cisco UCCX calls and
associated screen interactions
 Quality Assurance with intelligent
selection of calls for evaluation
 Performance Management module for
consolidated real-time and historical
reporting
Significant Benefits Gained



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Management efficiency improved with
fast insights and easy slicing and dicing
of data
Improved employee satisfaction and
accountability
Boosted service quality and customer
experience
Quality and value of service improved
VoIP Infrastructure for Maximum Quality and Efficiency
As an organization firmly focused on quality, Straumann embarked on
a journey of modernization of its communication technologies in 2010.
Worldwide, organizations of all types and sizes are rapidly transitioning
away from traditional telephony to VoIP due to the numerous benefits
associated with costs and efficiency. After extensive research and
deliberation, Straumann elected to upgrade from Siemens digital telephone
system to Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) – a highly secure,
virtual, and sophisticated IP telephony and customer interaction
management solution.
The objective was to balance lower costs of the new infrastructure with
improved quality of customer service. This required real-time monitoring of
contact center communications, such as the number and hold times for
calls in a queue. Carlo Wise who was in charge of this IT project at
Straumann, “We needed some way to manage call center volume and
meet our internal goals – provide insights into how the contact center is
performing, and ideally to also have tools to improve our performance.” To
accomplish this, Wise was searching for an interaction recording and
quality monitoring solution that would integrate seamlessly with
Straumann’s new VoIP telephony platform. The existing system could not
record IP interactions, which meant that a more advanced replacement had
to be found.
Advanced Call Recording and Quality Assurance
“VPI CAPTURE™ caught our attention among all other solutions available
on the market,” explained Wise. “During the whole process of the vendor selection I came to the conclusion that VPI,
a Cisco Solution Developer partner, was offering a better solution. The interface seemed very clean, very simple, and
very easy to use, which from a user perspective was one of our foremost requirements. When we previewed the
various call recording and quality monitoring solutions, VPI was the most modern and the most functional – one thing
that really impressed us was the dynamic reporting with drill down functionality, which was so intuitive and easy to
customize, particularly compared to the other offerings.”
Real-time Performance Reporting Maximizes the Value of Cisco Telephony
To effectively monitor contact center communications, Straumann needed to customize their real time and historical
metrics and reports, consolidated across multiple teams and sites. This needed to be done via an external reporting
application, as Cisco UCCX built-in reports, while extensive, were not structured the way Straumann needed. The VPI
contact center practice team offered a solution to the problem - VPI PERFORMANCE™.
VPI PERFORMANCE reports are highly customizable for real-time, historical, and trend reporting. This system
delivers vital performance information and highlights where adjustments need to be made on an agent, group, or site
basis. Straumann’s managers can now view real-time and historical performance metrics, consolidated across multiple
teams, queues, systems and sites. These Web-based reports allow authorized users to drill through the detailed data
so that root causes of problems or successes can be quickly identified along with opportunities for improvement. The
powerful solution, which off-loads the burden on the UCCX server, collects, processes and presents consolidated
telephony, performance, and business metrics in real or near-real time, in the context and format appropriate for each
user.
“VPI’s drill down and roll-up functionality is very nice,” said Wise. “We can now present data in a rolled-up matter in a
desktop ticker, but if you need to see more granular date for detailed information, you can drill into it right from there.
That was very important for us, from both, real-time reporting and historical reporting sides.”
Flexible Grouping Structure in Reports Resolved
“A flexible grouping structure was a very, very important point for us because of a very unique business need,”
continued Wise. “We have different departments and they all need to be able to communicate with each other. We
needed to set up our teams into separate groups within Cisco UCCX, but then reporting became problematic – we
needed to see the status of agents in individual groups, as well as globally. VPI’s tools helped us resolve this
challenge – our inter-departmental communication objectives have been met, and we can now report between different
teams in as much of a granular manner as we need.”
Empowering Front-line Agents with Real-Time Agent Desktop Tickers
Standards for monitoring contact center operations were very well defined at Straumann, to include a number of
custom metrics. “The VPI system came with lots of metrics out of the box, but we have defined our own custom metrics
and needed to be able to re-create those,” explained Wise. “VPI allowed us to do that. Having removed this complexity
of having to combine data manually, we are now meeting our objectives.”
The timely display of metrics can dramatically improve performance and accountability, enabling agents to self-monitor
and self-correct in real time. With VPI PERFORMANCE, there is no limitation on the amount of data collected or how
long it is stored so Straumann managers can now do true historical reporting, giving them insight into trending over
time. And since most reporting is now performed within VPI PERFORMANCE, the burden is off-loaded from
Straumann’s UCCX server.
Examples of Straumann’s Real-Time Agent Tickers
Empowering front line agents is very important to Wise and the Straumann contact center team. They needed to find a
way to present real-time data relevant to each employee, in order to help agents to be proactive and responsive to
issues in the contact center. This was resolved with VPI’s desktop tickers - real-time, interactive multi-view, “always on”
data displays, providing mission critical contact center information and performance statistics. “Each agent at
Straumann has their own ticker now,” explained Wise. “Each department has their own queue groups. If agents want
to see their individual queues, they can click on this metric and drill into it. We have several different agent tickers, but
they are basically structured the same. For example, our customer service agent ticker contains ACD group stats as
well as agent stats, such as how many calls they have taken or their average handling time. Every agent now sees
how their contact center department is doing, and they can see how they are doing individually, and how they can
adapt their behaviors to changing conditions. For example, they can see the number of customers in a queue and the
service level for each queue, which helps them determine how fast they need to wrap-up their current calls.”
Straumann uses color coding to drive attention to important conditions, such as service levels. For example, calls in
compliance are shown in green and as their wait in queue time approaches pre-defined thresholds, they turn yellow. If
a call sits in a queue for over 20 or 30 seconds, it will turn red. “That way, agents don’t have to look at the specific
amount of time that calls have been in queue – color coding helps them understand the status right away,” clarified
Wise. “We offer drill-down capability to agents as well. There is a score card button on their ticker, which takes them to
their stats in daily, weekly, and monthly views.” Equipped with this knowledge, Straumann’s agents can self-monitor
and self-manage. And there are never surprises about how well an agent is performing with respect to targets.
Supervisors Empowered to Take Action in Real-time
Using VPI tools, Straumann designed a ticker in a consistent manner for all supervisors and managers. They provide
ACD and agent group statistics. Based on each supervisor’s permissions, the ticker shows data that relates to the
group which they are responsible for, simply based on each supervisor’s login. Supervisors have the same drill-down
tools as agents. Since they have group metrics in their tickers, clicking on them will take them to the report that
provides more detail on their groups, individual agents, and other items.
Supervisors also receive automated alerts when certain thresholds are exceeded, so they can investigate and take
action to mitigate the alarm condition in a timely manner.
Example of Supervisor Real-Time Ticker and Corresponding Report – Launched by Clicking on a Ticker Metric
Wise stressed that supervisors are daily users of VPI reports for both, intra-day monitoring and historical trending.
“What we needed was the ability to provide reports to supervisors in the format that they want specifically. I have set
up the dashboard with data elements for supervisors- it was very easy in VPI interface to pull the data they wanted to
see. They can then easily adapt each report as needed to show data for one or more teams, depending on their
responsibilities. Again, color coding is used to help supervisors see at a glance where they are meeting performance
thresholds and where there is a need to train or coach an agent to improve his or her particular metric.”
Ad-Hoc Reports and Custom Metrics Deliver New Level of Insight and Convenience
Straumann team uses their VPI interface to create dynamic ad-hoc reports. These tools allow them to select and
organize the data in any way they want and run formulas, such as averages, for different teams and supervisors. The
reports can be viewed, saved for future access and exported into archives. Wise is pleased: “Very nice, convenient
and powerful. This customized reporting meets our needs.”
The Contact Center group at Straumann needed to define their own Key Performance Indicators to match their unique
needs and conditions. “VPI gave us the ability to recreate those statistics in their system – it was huge. It kept us from
having to wonder – are we performing at the needed level? There is no second guessing now, no gray area,” said
Wise.
Example from Interface with Straumann’s Custom Key Performance Indicators
Automated Quality Assurance Workflow for Improved Efficiency
In addition to the VPI call recording solution, Straumann also implemented VPI’s screen recording and quality
assurance agent evaluation solutions. The award-winning applications combine to provide a rich, business-centric set
of contact center management software tools that make a significant impact – mitigating risk, streamlining and
enhancing quality management and optimizing performance. VPI was selected to evaluate agents and ensure
consistently high levels of customer service. The powerful solution enables Straumann’s contact center managers to
objectively evaluate agent behaviors, provide timely feedback and support, boost service quality, and cultivate
customer experience and loyalty.
Custom rules for automated
selection of recordings for
evaluation – defined and set
up directly by Straumann
Since the implementation of VPI EMPOWER Suite, Straumann supervisors no longer manually search for the right call
recordings to evaluate. “We utilize custom business rules for automated scheduling of calls for quality evaluations” said
Wise. “Our rules contain the criteria for calls to be selected. VPI rules schedule and assign those automatically. This
is very nice. We can modify our criteria as needed. When the rules run, the system dumps the scheduled evaluations
into the appropriate evaluator’s queue in their ‘My VPI’ desktop. As soon as the supervisors log into the VPI system,
they see the list of their evaluations and just click on one of those items and it starts the evaluation process,
automatically launching the call recording and the rating form. It’s very simple and efficient – it removes a burden from
our supervisors.”
Conclusion
VPI EMPOWER was a critical piece in Straumann’s migration to VoIP communications. VPI solutions work
harmoniously with the Cisco UCCX platform, integrating seamlessly to form a remarkably effective, efficient solution to
the complex and evolving needs of the contact center. “VPI allowed us to overcome the challenge of change – going
from one way of doing things to another. The reporting is so rich within VPI that it is effectively where we do all our
reporting now. That’s nice because it gives us one common touch point, one place to go for our reporting needs. It
gives us consistency and it also reduces complexity. Instead of going to different places for different reports, it is now
all in one interface. Moving forward, we find there is more and more within VPI EMPOWER that we can utilize to help
us run our business even better.”