A global industrial manufacturer: US customer care on Genesys Cloud, with Microsoft Teams

The manufacturer's US customer care team supports the businesses that buy its products. Its forty-two agents, most of them working from home, ran on a hosted PBX with a desktop calling application whose contract was due to expire, and the company wanted to replace it rather than renew. At the same time, its systems integrator was moving the wider business onto Microsoft Teams telephony. The new contact centre had to fit that picture: Genesys Cloud CX for the people who serve customers, Teams for the offices and plants behind them, and calls flowing easily between the two.

The brief was deliberately lean. This was to be a minimum viable product for voice, delivered quickly, with no bots or speech recognition and no integrations beyond Microsoft Teams, so that the team could move first and build from there.

QVCCS was engaged by a global systems integrator and Genesys reseller to lead the technical delivery, working alongside the integrator's project manager, its carrier team and the manufacturer's own IT staff. Discovery ran as a series of Microsoft Teams workshops, which led to a functional requirements specification and design inputs, then build, testing and the move to live.

1. Discovery workshops and a functional requirements specification
2. Carrier trunking and Microsoft Teams connectivity designed with the integrator
3. Build of the organisation, users, roles, divisions, IVRs and queues
4. System integration testing, documented as the basis for user acceptance testing
5. Migration runbooks agreed with the carrier, then go-live by number porting
6. Hypercare, warranty support and handover to the integrator's managed service

Customers' calls arrive over the carrier's SIP trunks into a Genesys Cloud CX 1 organisation in a US region, on the Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) Cloud model with no equipment on site. Several IVRs, built on keypad menus, recognise the purpose of each call and release it to one of around twenty queues. A data-table-driven schedule supports round-the-clock operation with emergency messaging, and callers are offered a callback when queues are under pressure.

Agents work in Genesys Cloud CX itself, using WebRTC phones in the browser from home, with single sign-on, policy-based call recording, wrap-up codes and outbound calling on behalf of a queue that presents the right caller ID. The offices and manufacturing sites stay in Microsoft Teams, connected through a mix of Direct Routing and Operator Connect chosen to suit each site and facility, so agents can transfer and consult with colleagues across the business. Separate pre-production and production divisions keep testing apart from live service.

The service went live and the hosted PBX was retired, with the customer care team on Genesys Cloud CX and calls passing cleanly to and from colleagues in Microsoft Teams. It was not delivered on the original timeline. Midway through design, the project stalled after staffing changes in the manufacturer's customer service team and the arrival of a new head of customer service. When contact centre leadership was reassigned, the work restarted in earnest and went on to completion. The scope we had committed to was not affected; only the date of go-live moved.

The manufacturer's administrators shadowed the delivery team throughout and received formal training on the solution as built, and team leads were trained to train their own colleagues, so the business can manage everyday changes itself. Warranty support followed go-live, after which the service passed to the integrator's managed service.

• Forty-two home-based agents moved to Genesys Cloud CX 1
• Several IVRs routing service intents to around twenty queues
• Offices and plants connected through Teams Direct Routing and Operator Connect
• Go-live by number porting, followed by hypercare and warranty support
• Delivered in full after a pause in design caused by changes at the client

A lean scope written down clearly at the start is what allowed the project to survive a pause. When the manufacturer's new contact centre leadership picked the work up again, the requirements, the design and the decisions behind them were all on record, so the team could resume where it had stopped rather than start again. Keeping Genesys Cloud CX for the people who serve customers and Microsoft Teams for everyone else gave each group the tool that suits its work, joined by the routing that suited each site.