Cable&Wireless Worldwide transformed its customer service center by adopting a hosted Cisco contact center platform, which improved operational efficiency and reduced costs. The transition led to significant enhancements in customer and employee satisfaction, with abandoned call rates dropping to 1% and overall operational costs reducing by about 20%. Future plans include leveraging cloud-based technologies to further enhance service capabilities and empower agents.

1. Contact Center Transformation Boosts Customer Case Study
Service Levels, Slashes Costs
Cable&Wireless Worldwide enjoys “drinking its own champagne” by moving to the same Cisco hosted platform
offered to customers.
Challenge
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Cable&Wireless Worldwide is a world-leading international communications
Customer Name: Cable&Wireless Worldwide company, specializing in providing global business-critical network solutions and
Industry: Telecommunications services. Customer service is central to its strategy, because it needs to establish
Location: Worldwide close relationships with customers to fully understand their business challenges.
Company size: 6000 people In 2008, the company decided to re-think its Customer Service Center (CSC)
operations, which acted as a fault diagnostic and triage center to resolve customers’
Challenge
service issues as quickly as possible.
• Create customer service center of
excellence However, the CSC’s legacy contact center technology was proving increasingly costly
• Increase customer and employee to support. Cable&Wireless Worldwide was looking for new ways of working that could
satisfaction while reducing costs reduce costs, improve colleague satisfaction, and boost customer service.
Solution
“Our biggest challenges were around improving operational efficiency,” says Costi
• Cisco Unified Contact Center Hosted
Constantinou, head of performance & efficiency. “We wanted clear visibility of what
and IP Telephony
was happening in real time and enhanced processes in order to get, and deliver, the
• Call recording from Verint
customer experience we wanted.”
• Service management system from BMC
Results
Solution
In 2007, Cable&Wireless Worldwide had become the first service provider in Europe
• Significantly reduced contact center
operating costs
to build a hosted Cisco® Contact Center platform. Its solution, which includes the
intelligence and reach of its Cisco network, delivers a multichannel “contact center
• Reduced abandoned calls to 1 percent
as a service” to its customers. Smoothly integrating a range of options, the platform
• Increased employee satisfaction by
26 percent provides a flexible and fully-managed environment that meets most enterprises’
needs without extensive custom engineering.
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 4

2. Customer Case Study
“Our Cisco platform is It made perfect sense for Cable&Wireless Worldwide to switch its own CSC to the
embedded in the network, new platform with the same high-quality solutions that the company’s customers
enjoyed and become a center of excellence and best practice. In other words, “drink
giving us complete, its own champagne.”
end‑to‑end visibility of a call
from the moment it enters The transformation program included five work streams:
our network, so we can use 1. Increase customer expectations
virtual call routing to deliver 2. Improve platform reliability
calls in the best way.” 3. Improve operational efficiency
4. Simplify process and systems
5. Increase colleague satisfaction
Craig Palmer
Head of Contact Center and Collaboration
Cable&Wireless Worldwide Increase customer expectations
Cable&Wireless Worldwide has moved away from using a generic service model as
in the previous CSC. “We are now better equipped to make it easy for us to deal with
an issue,” says Richard Hunter, business insights manager, “and, in turn, it’s easier
for customers to do business with us.” Cable&Wireless Worldwide works with a wide
range of customers in various sectors, providing products and services. Colleagues
can now build up a real understanding of their customers’ issues, and apply
Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s services to their operations. With the contact center’s
skills-based routing facilities, teams were formed to serve groups of customers based
on their industry sector.
Improve Platform Reliability
Craig Palmer, head of contact center and collaboration says: “Our Cisco platform is
embedded in the network, giving us complete, end-to-end visibility of a call from
the moment it enters our network, so we can use virtual call routing to deliver calls
in the best way.” Cable&Wireless Worldwide also introduced a consolidated ticket
management system to help ensure better tracking and handling of issues passed to
service teams or third parties.
Improve operational efficiency
By moving to a single hosted platform and making more of real-time management
information, this work stream took advantage of “one view of the truth” across all CSC
operations. The old patchwork of complex and untrustworthy statistics was replaced
by a simplified set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) focused on fault resolution
and quality measures. Better information guided shift reviews, replacing expensive
legacy shift patterns with more flexible ones to meet demand. Five call centers
were consolidated into three centers of excellence, while introducing call recording
from Cisco partner Verint helped improve agent training and the wider business’
understanding of how to better support agents and customers.
Simplify process and systems
Having one source of management information allowed Cable&Wireless Worldwide
to clean and rationalize data, and simplify processes. A single service management
system was migrated to Remedy. Better management information also highlights the
skills and information colleagues need to better serve different groups of customers .
Plus, an on-boarding process for new customers and products helps ensure cohesive
integration into the service structure.
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.. Page 2 of 4

3. Customer Case Study
“We needed to live and Increase colleague satisfaction
breathe what we were Three-monthly onsite demonstrations informed employees about the work streams
and gave them the opportunity to discuss and feel part of the transformation.
doing in the contact center, Significant focus was given to colleague satisfaction and feedback in the company’s
because we are customers’ “Your Say” satisfaction index. Cable&Wireless Worldwide set up a reward and
first line support and their recognition scheme, along with action groups to tackle not just commercial priorities,
window into Cable&Wireless but also issues that staff felt passionate about.
Worldwide. Our role is not Results
only to serve our customers The entire transformation process has brought dramatic results.
every day, but also help
Streamlined processes and deeper understanding of customers’ needs mean that the
them better manage their CSC can fix issues faster, and in line with customers’ business priorities.
own contact operations.”
By monitoring services closely, the company can alert customers that issues are being
resolved before customers even know a problem exists. The average time to restore
Craig Palmer has dropped by nearly half, while faults repaired within service-level agreements
Head of Contact Center and Collaboration (SLAs) are up 10 percent. In fact, the CSC is on track to exceed its overall targets.
Cable&Wireless Worldwide
Cable&Wireless Worldwide has dramatically reduced operating costs, with IT-related
total cost of ownership down by about 20 percent. This cost reduction is partly due to
the Cisco modular systems-based approach, which avoids repeating capital “top ups”
to purchase systems upgrades for the legacy system. The centralized platform also
reduces complexity and, therefore, maintenance costs.
The biggest cost reductions, however, have come from CSC operations, down
significantly over two years.
Focusing on performance consistency, a standardized approach to operational
structures, and consolidating operations onto the hosted platform has eliminated
agent isolation.
Keeping people informed and engaged in the process has helped them understand
the transformations aims. “During this time, we improved our overall people statistics,”
says Constantinou. “Both customer and employee satisfaction has improved.”
For the 280 agents at the three centers, the working environment has also improved
significantly. New desktop phones have improved call quality, and management
information (MI) and skills-based routing have created multiskilled teams with better
trained agents, able to understand customers’ concerns. Key call management
information is displayed in real time, so agents and supervisors can react faster to
incoming calls, while colour coding makes identifying hotspots easy. Abandoned calls
levels are best-in-class at about just 1 percent, while employee satisfaction is up 26
percent.
“We needed to live and breathe what we were doing in the contact center, because
we are customers’ first line support and their window into Cable&Wireless Worldwide,”
says Constantinou. “Our role is not only to serve them every day, but also help them
better manage their own contact center operations.”
The whole call center industry has acknowledged the scale and success of
Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s CSC’s transformation, with various awards across Best
People Practice, Transformation Strategies, Training and Individual Support Team
categories in European, national and regional Customer Service & Contact Center
Awards 2009 and 2010.
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.. Page 3 of 4

4. Customer Case Study
Next Steps
Cable&Wireless Worldwide and Cisco are working on the next-generation contact
center that will use intelligent cloud-based computing to bring new levels of unified
communications, collaboration, and multichannel capabilities such as video and
social media. The CSC is already considering how these developments will improve
its customer contact strategies. A key focus will be to empower agents to be more
proactive in resolving issues and to integrate service into customers’ operations,
giving them better visibility of what Cable&Wireless Worldwide is doing.
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