Leading regional call center firm Teleperformance Egypt has a growing portfolio of customers in 22 countries, including key multinational clients. The company migrated its communications system to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V virtualization. Since then, the organization has not experienced any downtime, mailbox sizes have increased, and the cost of all physical servers has been cut.
Established in 2007, Teleperformance Egypt is the first multinational contact center company to open in Egypt. It provides all contact center services, including customer care, technical support, and debt collection outsourcing services in Egypt, the Middle East and Africa, and offshore markets serving North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe.
Teleperformance Egypt operates more than 1,300 workstations equipped with state-of-art technology such as predictive dialing, full automatic call distribution with computer–telephone integration capabilities, and customer relationship management software. Avaya, Melita, EIS, PGS, Siebel, and Vantive are among the company’s equipment suppliers. With around 1,700 employees serving 22 countries, Teleperformance Egypt conducts programs in more than 15 different languages and dialects on behalf of major international clients.
The call center has a growing portfolio of multinational customers. Email messaging is one of the most heavily used applications in call centers—and Teleperformance Egypt is no exception. The company needed to build and maintain a more reliable, secure, and cost-effective communications and collaboration infrastructure that was scalable to meet its changing needs.
Ahmed Ghallab, Senior System Administrator at Teleperformance Egypt, says: “Teleperformance is always seeking to upgrade its systems, and with the previous infrastructure, we had a single communication and collaboration server. With the constant growth of our business in Egypt, it was difficult to maintain service and business continuity.”
The call center operator needed to boost employee productivity by establishing a messaging, calendaring, and collaboration infrastructure to ensure real-time communication between the company’s buildings in Egypt and its customers. Fortunately, Teleperformance Egypt was already working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Information Technology of Egypt Corporation (ITE Corp) for regular health checks and maintenance of its infrastructure.
Solution
When Microsoft released its Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, which includes Hyper-V virtualization technology, Teleperformance Egypt saw an opportunity to expand its existing environment and save money. The company also needed to reduce the cost of its email storage requirements, while increasing the size of employees’ mailboxes.
ITE Corp gave a presentation to the company to demonstrate the performance and resilience of Hyper-V as a virtualization solution compared to VMware, as well as the lower operating and licensing costs. The partner recommended migrating to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 with Microsoft Outlook Web App messaging and collaboration client. To ensure high availability, ITE Corp built an architecture with network load balancing and clustered mailboxes on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Hyper-V. This avoided the cost of deploying two physical servers.
The systems integration work took place in the third quarter of 2010 and was completed in just seven working days for actual deployment. Milad Ghaly, Technical Resource Team Leader, ITE Corp, says: “With Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook Web App, users can now integrate seamlessly with all the call center applications used by Teleperformance Egypt. They can access voicemail, instant messaging, and email and text messages—all in one place and through all major web browsers.”
Benefits
Teleperformance Egypt is now using the functionality in Exchange Server 2010 to support a high performing and resilient infrastructure without the need to invest in expensive add-on products from third parties. Gallab says: “With Hyper-V, we have a flexible and powerful virtualization environment through which we’ve been able to cut the cost of all physical servers. It will also help the company avoid unplanned downtime—in fact, since Exchange Server 2010 went live, there has been no downtime.”
Enhances agility and efficiency. Call center staff have seamless access to messaging tools, calendaring, collaboration, and real-time data from a single inbox. Administrators can easily update the solution to meet user needs without third-party support.
Boosts control and compliance. With the new system, employees can meet their targets more easily. They have greater control over email messages, exchanging information quickly and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Improves environmental sustainability. Virtualization of servers is resulting in less demand for electricity to power cooling and air conditioning.
Reduces long-term storage costs. Storage requirements overall have been cut by between 10 and 15 percent by using Exchange Server 2010 to store messaging data rather than expanding the storage area network. Teleperformance Egypt will lower its long-term storage costs by an estimated 10 percent, while at the same time boosting mailbox sizes.
Increases IT productivity. The company is benefiting from better application performance, improved administration tools, and a more engaged IT department that can serve the business by focusing on higher value work instead of mitigating downtime.
Addresses operating challenges. The solution is more stable and easier for Teleperformance Egypt to manage. Ghaly says: “Arranging remote access is now much quicker because administrators no longer need to set up virtual private network access or configure multiple applications for email.”
Halves recovery time compared to earlier versions. Exchange Server 2010 has the capacity to cut recovery time by half compared to earlier versions of the company’s communication and collaboration technology.
