In Focus : Improved Uptime Through Intelligent Communications

After it launched its travel portal in India, the key challenge for
MakeMyTrip.com was to manage its growth and expanding business. The company,
which began with a 25-seat Contact Center, was looking to scale to a 250-center
capability.

It was looking for a solution that would keep its infras­tructure running
24x7, to power the online business and provide a complete customer experience.
MakeMyTrip.com needed a reliable, robust and expandable solution that could
match the company's growth and enable it to remain cost effective and
profitable. This is when the company decided to get in touch with Avaya
GlobalConnect.

Solution suggested

After being briefed by the client, Avaya's team came up with at least four
key solutions for an intelligent communications strategy for MakeMyTrip.com.
These included the Avaya Call Management System (CMS), a recording platform; a
Wall Board, to provide a complete view of the center and agent availability and
a standards-based, resilient and modular IP telephony offering.

While engaging with MakeMyTrip.com, it was high­lighted how these solutions
could optimize the efficiency of the portal's contact center by allowing it to
increase call volumes without adding staff, and also enhancing productivity,
while keeping a close control on costs. At the same time it would improve
staffing, call flow and service levels, thereby winning customer loyalty, using
the CMS.

The solution also helped the portal's IT administrators to monitor and
analyze virtually everything that would be happening in the contact center, from
wait times to average answer speeds, to percent reduction over the past year in
abandoned call times. This in turn meant that the managers could make on-the-fly
decisions to redistribute expansive human resources, or redirect calls.

Yet another benefit was that historical data could be leveraged to develop
new and improved procedures that are helping it increase performance and
minimize costs. And lastly, it ensured that customers were offered an uptime of
99,99.

The challenge

While the solution sounded rosy there were some ground level challenges
while deploying it after it was approved. Meeting the stringent 24x7 criteria of
the client was the biggest challenge.

For the 25-seat domestic facility, MakeMyTrip.com went in for a Prologix
model, the lowest scalable product available within the AGCL show window. In
2006, MakeMyTrip.com decided to upgrade the solution and introduce significant
functionality into its system. The company needed to transition from Prologix to
Avaya Global­Connect's Contact Center Product, the S8720.

“MakeMyTrip.com needed a solution which was scalable, expandable,
multilocational (across four cities), reliable, redundant and always up and
running,” commented Ketan Shah, BU Head-Contact Center, Avaya GlobalConnect.

MakeMyTrip.com was invited to Avaya GlobalConnect's Customer Studio in
Mumbai, to gain a first hand feel of the solution it was looking for. The Avaya
team at the Customer Studio analyzed the business requirements of MakeMyTrip.com
and designed a solution incor­porating numerous components from Avaya
GlobalConnect and its technology partners.

“To begin with, Avaya offered us its Call Management System (CMS), an
operational effecti­veness solution for integrated analysis and reporting. The
aim was to help us keep in touch with virtually everything going on within our
Contact Center, evaluate the performance of an agent, a group of agents, a
single contact center or multiple locations around the world. It provided us
with robust, real-time monitoring and historical reporting capabilities,
including custom reporting, task schedu­ling, exception notification, among
others,” informed Sachin Bhatia, Cofounder and CMO, MakeMyTrip.com

“We offered them the CMS with its reporting tool, to get an insight into the
entire call data. MakeMyTrip.com was receiving over 20,000 calls a day and these
needed to be monitored extensively for quality,” added Shah.

The call recording solution gave MakeMyTrip.com the ability to undertake
recordings on demand, playback and query recordings and send them by email from
anywhere to anywhere. The call recording and quality monitoring solution also
allowed the customer to track and analyze specific calls. It's support
functionality included total recording for compliance and interaction analytics
purposes, selective recording establishing rules for which calls were recorded,
recording on demand, typically for quality monitoring. Additionally, MakeMyTrip
invested in a Display solution from Avaya, a Wall Board, to provide the complete
status of the call center-calls in queue, number of engaged agents, number of
free agents, etc-at a glance. The Wall Board is currently also being used by the
company to pop up special messages and greetings for its young internal
customers-its employees.

Finally, MakeMyTrip.com implemented IP telephony in its Contact Center to
build a converged voice/data foundation that was reliable, efficient and able to
support the new communications capabilities. The goal was also to embrace a
platform that would enable the company to go multi-location, with just the
addition of the IP phones and no major expenditure on infrastructure investment.

Business value

The Avaya GlobalConnect CMS solution for instance, has helped optimize the
efficiency of the call center by allowing it increase call volumes without
adding staff. The company has been able to enhance productivity, while keeping a
close control on costs. Greatly improved Customer Responsiveness has been
achieved through the use of the CMS. The solution is being leveraged by
MakeMyTrip.com to improve staffing, call flow and service levels, thereby
winning customer loyalty with superior services and support.The CMS solution has
given MakeMyTrip.com the power to monitor and analyze virtually everything
that's happening in the Contact Center. From wait times to average answer
speeds, to percent reduction over the past year in abandoned call times.

As far as the customer's customers are concerned, MakeMyTrip.com is now able
to offer them a 99.99 percent uptime. With the Avaya solution, it is also
possible to route calls to specifically skilled agents, who have expertise in
areas such as ticketing, travel packages, hotels, etc. The IP solution,
meanwhile is helping MakeMyTrip.com to improve productivity and efficiency.
“With our IP solution and simple intuitive GUI, users can access a wide range of
applications, initiate recording on demand for compliance, risk management,
quality assurance and best practices from any Avaya IP telephone,” said Shah.

SUBBALAKSHMI BM

subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in