BOC is a subsidiary of Linde Plc, the largest provider of industrial, medical and specialist gases in the world. For over a century, the company’s gases and expertise have contributed to advances in industry and everyday life, including steelmaking, refining, chemical processing, environmental protection, wastewater treatment, welding and cutting, food processing and distribution, glass production, electronics and healthcare.
Linde is focused on transforming the company for the digital future, with a vision to be the best performing global industrial gases and engineering company.
“We were particularly impressed with the quality and skills of DXC’s people.”
Daniel Whittle Digital Manager, BOC
Business challenge
BOC’s traditional on-premises contact centre solution was costly to run and offered limited options to improve customer experience. In addition, the solution was not integrated with any of the company’s enterprise applications, including SAP or Salesforce, and support was soon to cease.
Daniel Whittle, digital manager for BOC, commented, “We identified the emergence of newer technology in this space and solutions that were much more agile. We wanted that agility to offer our customers what they needed via the telephone system. We needed to be able to adapt to their ever-changing needs, however, our existing, ageing technology made that difficult and expensive to achieve.”
BOC sought a modern, cloud-based solution to replace its complex call centre infrastructure and carriage, and ensure scalability and reliability. With an aggressive timeframe to meet the legacy system’s end-of-life deadline, benefits sought included:
- Reduced call wait times
- Improved customer experience
- Streamlined agent and workforcemanagement
- Reduced contact centre related costs
- Greater levels of innovation andautomation
- Enhanced security and PCI (PaymentCard Industry) compliance
In addition, Salesforce was being rolled out as the global customer relationship management (CRM) system by Linde Plc, as part of the company’s broader digital transformation. Integration with Salesforce was vital, as was the ability to integrate with other critical enterprise systems, such as SAP.
Solution
DXC Technology proposed its cloud-based contact centre solution, DXC Adaptive Customer Excellence, based on Amazon Connect and delivered as a service. This solution provided rapid time to value, scalability and cost-effective consumption pricing with considerable “pre-packaged” benefits, including seamless customer experience, automated call direction, call quality monitoring for compliance obligations, and real-time personalisation of customer conversations.
BOC selected DXC as implementation partner to deploy the contact centre integrated with Nimbus Workforce Management (WFM), Salesforce and SAP. DXC was chosen after an initial Expression of Interest (EOI) and subsequent demonstration showcasing the potential seamless integrations available with SAP, Salesforce and credit card payment systems. DXC then completed an initial pilot over five weeks, where use cases were addressed as a future state. The complete new contact centre solution was then built with some components of the pilot reused in production.
The decision was based largely on the capability demonstrated during the successful pilot and expertise of DXC’s AWS practice. Whittle commented, “DXC understood our desired end state and showcased some of the more aspirational aspects of the solution, bringing to life the possibilities for a fully automated and integrated end to end system. That appealed to us — we could see that DXC’s dedicated AWS practice had the skills, knowledge and expertise to deliver the best possible solution.”
The solution, based on Amazon Connect, offered BOC substantial new functionality in a modern cloud environment with the ability to integrate with other enterprise solutions for a unique and vastly improved customer and agent experience.
Implementation
DXC collaborated globally with BOC and Linde Plc with close engagement and involvement of various stakeholders from six countries to deliver the solution over two phases. Completed in just under eight months, the solution sits across two separate call centres serving Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines.
Taking a Scrum sprint approach allowed the team to deliver high-quality work faster and more frequently, with the flexibility to adapt to changing needs as they were identified. BOC’s customer was the focus throughout, with all functionality centred on addressing their pain points and improving their overall experience.
DXC provided further specialist expertise to replace BOC’s legacy WFM solution with an agile Nimbus cloud solution, fully integrated with their contact centre to optimise agent utilisation. The solution is hosted on an AWS cloud platform, providing the scale to adapt to consumption pattern changes as required.
Any challenges were quickly and efficiently addressed. Whittle said, “DXC continually engaged with our internal stakeholders to manage the change as effectively as possible, providing guidance and expertise on how the DXC solution would handle various situations. The team offered their expertise in defining how an agent may have done something previously and how that would work in the future, while also helping us embrace new opportunities for improved work practices.”
Results and benefits
DXC helped BOC to digitally transform and optimise contact centre operations and elevate customer and employee experience. Two hundred and fifty agents now actively use BOC’s contact centre, with the entire project completed in under eight months — an aggressive timeframe given the complexity of multiple enterprise system integrations and the advanced functionality delivered.
Real-time data integration with Salesforce provides automatic caller authentication and contact pop-ups, allowing agents to personalise their interactions and offer seamless transitions. Agents report a much clearer view of the customer than previously possible — which helps improve productivity, service and customer satisfaction.
PayShield was introduced to improve PCI compliance and ensure confidentiality of customers’ credit card details. DXC also developed SAP integration and voice automation features for seamless agentless ordering for some customers. Locally, many of BOC’s customers transact only a handful of times a year, often buying gas in small quantities on an ad-hoc basis. This integration negates the need for known customers to speak to an agent, further improving the timeliness of response, reducing call wait times and improving overall customer experience.
Whittle commented, “Automated ordering was something we had aspired to but was previously too difficult and expensive to implement. This platform offered the capability to implement it easily. I would expect our NPS (Net Promoter Score) to improve as a result of the ability to more quickly and easily adapt to customer needs and expectations.” For agents, it frees up time to focus on more complex calls, and for the company, additional cost reduction benefits.
More effective agent assessment and coaching is now possible with automated call recording and transcription. Deep analysis and classification of calls is simple with visualisation of data providing BOC with opportunities to better understand customer pain points and improve service. The integration with Nimbus also ensures optimum utilisation of workforce agents to suit projected call volumes while maintaining the highest-quality customer experience.
“DXC understood our desired end state and showcased some of the more aspirational aspects of the solution, bringing to life the possibilities for a fully automated and integrated end to end system. That appealed to us — we could see that DXC’s dedicated AWS practice had the skills, knowledge and expertise to deliver the best possible solution.”
Daniel Whittle Digital Manager, BOC
Results and benefits
In addition, DXC supported BOC through the change management process. Whittle said, “This was a large project with a key part of our customer-facing organisation. DXC helped showcase the long-term benefits for employees and guided us through the whole training and upskilling process.”
At BOC’s request, DXC also provided training and enablement for staff, empowering them to take complete control in supporting the solution for the future.
With the capacity to identify new needs and make continuous adjustments to improve customer experience, BOC is more adaptable and responsive to changing customer needs and behaviour.
Whittle concluded, “We developed a great relationship with the DXC team throughout this project. They did an excellent job in supporting BOC to deliver our new Amazon Connect Contact Centre solution. We were particularly impressed with the quality and skills of DXC’s people. This solution has now been showcased around the world and endorsed by our global colleagues. Many other Linde companies are actively evaluating how they might be able to use it following the success of our local project.”
David Tait, digital transformation lead, Australia and New Zealand, DXC, said, “The effort and commitment shown by the BOC team was key to this project’s success.”