Challenge
As a Dallas-based online travel company, World Ventures serves as a host agent for thousands of home-based travel agents throughout the United States. In early 2008, World Ventures built a strong executive leadership team with the focus on doubling their business within two years. With this executive team, many new business initiatives were put in place, including bringing their outsourced member services and client services support in house and relocating their corporate office to accommodate their growth. World Ventures also needed to leverage very sophisticated and intelligent communications routing and reporting to make sure their members and clients were receiving phenomenal support. Their clients and members were requesting more methods of communications to include email and web chat in addition to their current methods of voice calls and faxes.
Solution
In May 2008, World Ventures began working with Unified360 to determine the best solution for these and other initiatives with specific focus on controlling costs and accommodating for a scalable growth model. After months of diligent work with Unified360 and Cisco, World Ventures chose to implement a Cisco Unified Communications Manager with Cisco Contact Center Express in August of 2008. Along with the Cisco solution provided by Unified360, World Ventures realized an immediate return on investment (referred to by Unified360 as I-ROI) in comparison to their previous cost structure by 1) decreasing their usage-based telecommunication costs and 2) decreasing their monthly investment from their personnel outsourcing model. Just as important was the fact that they could scale at a much lower cost model than their previous model.
Result
“Unified360 brought us a solution that cost us nothing out of pocket and decreased our monthly and annual expenses with a Cisco solution,” states Al Walters, CFO for World Ventures. “This was important to us as we were already investing heavily into a new office for our 120 employees in our corporate office as well as rolling out many other business initiatives which had costs associated to them as well.” Additionally, “The solution from Cisco and Unified360 allowed us to integrate our databases with the telephony system as well as leverage custom reporting which allows our member and client services to better serve them. It has also allowed us to bring remote agents online and into the call, email, fax, and chat queues to handle all forms of communication with our clients and members,” mentioned Henry Wang, Vice President of Technology at World Ventures.