HarborOne aims for closer customer collaboration

22 Feb 2012

American credit union HarborOne wanted to get closer to its customers and used Aspect’s Unified Communications to achieve it.

New England-based credit union HarborOne wanted to get closer to its customers. It had a vision for growing its business through increased customer communication and therefore customer service across its 14 branches and mortgage office. With $1.8bn in assets it can be seen that the company was already a dominant player.

It had taken three years to get to the point at which new UC capability was a realistic option. It had upgraded and expanded its internal network capabilities, replaced its decade-old Nortel telephone system, and made the strategic decision to add the foundational elements of UC&C from Microsoft, including SharePoint and Lync (then known as Office Communications Server) as the organisation’s voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and voice/Web conferencing system integrated with presence.

What it hadn’t done yet was to look at its contact centre. This had used a basic ACD/PBX system for all incoming calls. The company wanted something else, though; it wanted reporting and therefore management capacity, call recording, routing and the ability to track calls through to their resolution. “We may have been relatively small, but we had a big vision, the desire to offer a robust experience to our customers, and for our contact centre to serve the enterprise as well,” said Wayne F. Dunn, senior vice president and chief technology officer of HarborOne. “We wanted to utilise presence and instant messaging – maybe even customer-facing video at some point – so we knew we needed a future-proof platform that could take us there.”

The company chose contact solutions provider Aspect to supply its Seamless Customer Service unified communications offering.  This is powered by Aspect Unified IP which has routing and portal capacity. This co-ordinated self-service with easy access to live agents, and full integration with Microsoft Lync allowed the system to reach a range of company experts seamlessly when there was a more complex requirement. This can now be tracked and recorded, whereas before when the interaction went away from the call centre that would be an end to any reporting.

HarborOne has already saved nearly $150,000 a year by replacing its legacy data lines with SIP trunking and another nearly $100,000 a year on travel costs by using Microsoft Lync and Aspect for video and web conferencing capabilities.

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