Avaya, a world leader in solutions to improve and simplify communications and collaboration, announced that it is working with DIRECTV to ensure 99.9 percent availability of its customer communication platform and continue with its digital transformation process to offer functionalities that makes it easier for clients to reach its customer care team, which manages six million calls per month, 1,300 IVR channels and 2,500 agents, all working remotely.
DIRECTV is a leading digital entertainment company that has been acquiring, producing and distributing sports and entertainment content throughout Latin America for more than 20 years. It currently offers its customers different services that include prepaid and post-paid satellite television subscriptions and the panregional streaming platform DIRECTVGO, through which customers can access live and on-demand content, whenever and wherever they want. All DIRECTV customers, prepaid and postpaid, have access to the platform at no additional cost.
A key part of the DIRECTV’s success has been to continuously deploy the latest technologies with a goal of reaching excellence in service and customer care, facing and overcoming every challenge. While this goal made digital transformation imminent, the pandemic put it to the test by demanding the execution of a large and complex project within the context of a new work model.
With the situation in mind, DIRECTV and Avaya took nine months to develop a joint project which included seven critical areas on a platform that manages six million monthly calls, 1,300 IVR channels and 2,500 agents, all working from home.
The result was a seamless update without incidents or negative business impact. DIRECTV and Avaya agreed to a new SaaS (Software as a Service) contract modality which allows the company to increase or reduce its service capacity based on business needs.
For example, DIRECTV can now easily provide additional IVR ports to high-audience events, such as as a soccer championship match, to meet demand. Included in the solution are Avaya monitoring, single point-of-contact, advanced solution architecture, and back-up testing, among other services.
“For more than two years we have been on a process of digital transformation of our business to respond to new customer habits, uses, and preferences. The pandemic undoubtedly accelerated this process, and that is why it was key for us to work together with expert partners who helped us achieve our objectives in a new timeframe,” said Alejandro Chao, executive director of IT Infrastructure and Operations at DIRECTV Latin America.
“Avaya understood from the beginning the importance of this project to DIRECTV and used all its global project management experience to deploy a team that focused on reducing the need for on-site work and maximized remote management,” he added.
“Today’s ‘Everything Customer’ wants business services to be integrated into their daily lives, and to be able to define the service they want. For companies, meeting this new expectation is both a significant challenge and a great opportunity,” said Daniel Sacks of Avaya Latin America Southern Cone region.
“Gartner has called this next generation of customers the ‘Everything Customer’ not as a segment but as a mindset. Ultimately, customers will expect the services they use and related experiences to ‘build’ around them. And that’s just what Avaya does best, helping its customers create experiences that matter,” he added.
As in other industries, DIRECTV will continue its digital transformation process by tracking the changes in the entertainment industry, as well as looking for ways to reach customers on the different communication channels that allow it to meet their needs or solve their concerns, including giving customers the chance to alternate between channels without losing context and traceability
