Vcare Switches from Avaya to Cisco
By Priyanka Akhouri
Mumbai, Jul 3, 2007

Vcare Call Centres India - a 100% subsidiary of Call Centres India (CCI) has contact centre operations in Chennai and New Delhi, providing both voice and non-voice services to global clients. The company has deployed Cisco's technology. Before Cisco's solution, the company was operating out on a leased facility, using Avaya-based solutions. Vcare wanted a robust, secure and scalable infrastructure for supporting their inbound and outbound calling process.

The company has implemented Cisco IP Contact Centre (IPCC) solution and is currently using Cisco Call Manager and the Electronic Private Branch Exchange (EPBX), Cisco Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and Cisco Unity Voicemail.

Sandeep Mehra, CEO of Vcare Call Centre India, said, "We found Cisco's IP-based offering superior than the traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM based offering). We started using Cisco's Voice over IP Solution for about 2 years. We moved from a leased facility to our own facility and found that the voice quality of the Cisco's IPCC was far superior to any of its competitors." Mehra adds, "This solution helps large enterprises that need to centralize their contact center operations to gain more control over their resources."

Vcare faced several challenges before deploying the solution. "We had to have a cost effective solution, which would meet the ever-changing process requirements and co-ordination that is faced by SMB segment-based clients," said Mehra.

According to the company, exploring Cisco system's full functionality has been a big challenge. Though the system is very powerful, the domain expertise of this system is still very limited. IT plays an important role in addressing these challenges. One of the major challenges - cost effectiveness - is strictly based on the total cost incurred on IT equipment and maintenance. Total cost of ownership, in the long run, is a lot lower in Cisco.

The company claims that the main business benefits of the solution are that it is very simple to use, stable, and reliable. Additionally, through the usage of IP-based systems, the survivability of calls is the highest. Even if one of the lines were to go down, the calls would roll over to another circuit within a few milliseconds, without disconnecting the calls.

Effective correspondence and communication is the most common HR issue, as disclosed by Vcare. "Reporting being one of the important functions in a call center, our HR manager is able to substantiate any action we take using the vast reports we get from IT. Through Cisco's technology everything is logged in the system," said Mehra.

The infrastructure deployed at Vcare's data center include Cisco Predictive, Preview, Outbound, 24/7 Dialer, Cisco Call Manager called PBX, Cisco Unity Voice Mail, and Cisco IP 7940 series phones. The Cisco solution was deployed in a span of about 3 months, start to finish. The company's estimated IT budget for this year is about US $250 thousand. It is looking to deploy these solutions in multiple cities in India.

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