SEOUL, Korea - March 4, 2004 - Cisco Systems, Inc announced today that Samsung Life Insurance's Internet Protocol (IP) Contact Center is fully operational, and has improved agent productivity by 20 percent and increased customer and employee satisfaction. The contact center, widely recognized as one of the largest in the country with 960 agents, is powered by the Cisco® IP Contact Center (IPCC) customer contact software.
Deployed by Hewlett-Packard Korea, Samsung Life Insurance's contact center is also the first large call center to migrate from legacy private branch exchange (PBX) technologies to an end-to-end all-IP-based solution. Market research firm Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific expects this trend to continue in Korea. According to the company, by 2007, revenues from IP-based telephony will surpass that of legacy PBX revenues as call centers adopt IP-based solutions.
"With Cisco's IPCC solution, Samsung Life was able to make its contact center operations more efficient. For example, it was able to better manage call information, routing calls more effectively in the main center as well as locally distributed calls," said Mr. Kim Dong-Jin, team leader of Samsung SDS who supervised the system implementation for Samsung Life Insurance. "Our analysis so far shows that the new all-IP contact center has improved Samsung Life Insurance's productivities by over 20 percent. Also, during the year-end festivities, the center was able to handle the huge increase in call volumes. The 90,000 calls per day the center handled was three times more than previous year-end periods."
Samsung Life Insurance's experience closely mirrors that of companies elsewhere in the world who have deployed the Cisco IPCC solution. Some of the benefits include streamlined operations, improved service quality, increased customer satisfaction and reduced operational costs. Samsung Life Insurance's agents were able to process up to 20 percent more calls per day while the interactive voice response (IVR) system handled six times more calls than the previous system. Average waiting time and handling time was also reduced. All these improvements have resulted in increased customer satisfaction, said Mr. Kim.
The company also found that its operational costs were reduced as communication costs between centers utilized the company's data network so that long-distance toll charges did not need to be paid. Employee morale also increased as the company is now able to produce more accurate statistics and call reports and channel calls to overloaded centers to other centers, enabling employees to work more flexible shifts.
"Samsung Life Insurance has made a first big step towards systemizing its operations. The all-IP contact center now provides a foundation for the company to flexibly cope with a wide range of customer environments, such as Internet and e-mail sales and support, as well as to build in newer technologies in the future such as IP videoconferencing," said Mr Kim In-Gyo, vice president, Cisco Systems Korea. "The company's three main centers in Seoul, Busan and Gwangju now run on a common IP-based architecture, enabling many functions and operations to transparently cross over to one another. This is how IP solutions are enabling organizations to improve their productivity and lower their operational costs."
Cisco IPCC delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management over an IP infrastructure. By combining multichannel automatic call distributor (ACD) functionality with IP telephony in a unified solution, Cisco IPCC allows companies to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure.
