For Its CX and Agent Experience, Morrison Water Services Taps Vonage

Feeling Pressure to Guarantee Business Continuity

Morrison Water Services is the leading service provider in the water and wastewater infrastructure sectors in the U.K. The company works with clients to help them manage their infrastructure and networks. The business provides class-leading support and makes significant investments in customer service training, culture, and strategy.

While the organization’s clients all had their own contact centers, Morrison Water Services didn’t. And with a new, critical water-sector contract about to begin, that had to change. Additionally, the business believed it wasn’t sufficiently incentivizing its agents to provide more than a basic level of customer service, which made the prospect of allowing remote work even more daunting, as it would limit agent access to the contact center’s physical wallboard: a critical quality-assurance tool. Even beyond the wallboard issue, the company had no way to facilitate real-time communications for its off-site agents, nor the ability to make changes—without tech support—to its communications platform.

As a dedicated Salesforce shop, the organization needed a contact center solution that would integrate seamlessly with Morrison Water Services’ CRM platform and:

• Give the service provider complete end-to-end control of the customer experience

• Reward agents with citations and badges based on efficiency, effectiveness, and more

• Enable remote agents 

• Establish a robust business continuity plan

• Allow contact center administrators to effect adjustments without relying on a help desk

To satisfy these demands, the company chose Vonage Contact Center with Salesforce integration.

Creating a Fluid Contact Center CX

Vonage Contact Center with Salesforce integration supports Morrison Water Services’ mission to deliver a first-class customer experience by empowering its agents with an advanced contact center solution that features a host of customer-first benefits:

• Salesforce integration: The Vonage solution integrated with Morrison Water Services’ longtime CRM platform quickly, easily, and seamlessly. “The depth of management intelligence Vonage offers our Salesforce platform has been invaluable during the COVID-19 lockdowns,” said Gemma Layton, customer experience manager, Morrison Water Services. “We’ve heavily modified our Salesforce instance to pull regulatory data, too, so with Vonage, we can recognize callers, go straight to their records, and correlate that regulatory data instantly.”

• Motivate: With Motivate, a gamification tool, Morrison Water Services incentivizes agents to increase the number of calls they take and enhance the types of conversations they make. "For example, to win our Engagement Guru badge," said Layton, "we judge an agent's calls for the appropriateness of their length and whether the agent’s hitting all the right marks, which encourages them to deliberately slow down and focus on adding value."

• WebRTC: By using WebRTC, a technology that leverages APIs to provide web browsers and mobile apps with real-time communication, the Vonage solution gives the company the flexibility to transition their employees to remote work on demand. "The option to use WebRTC is fantastic," said Layton. "It gives us a business continuity plan so our service levels stay up and our customers can always get in touch, no matter what.”

• Mobility: With Vonage’s mobile app, the organization’s agents have access to a softphone: a feature that makes it easy to send and receive telephone calls over the internet via a computer or smartphone. “In the last week alone,” said Layton, “not only did some of my agents have issues with their networks, but our office had a power outage, too. But because we had the softphones through the Vonage Contact Center solution, the majority of my team remained highly productive through this challenge.”

• Dashboards: To recreate the contact center’s physical wallboard—which displays agent presence, interaction-state data, and more—the Vonage solution provides dashboards that Morrison Water Services gives its remote agents read-only access to. “The Vonage dashboard helps them judge their workload and empowers team leaders to have open and fair performance conversations,” said Layton.

• Self-service: Vonage’s self-service tools give administrators step-by-step assistance so they can set up their account, manage it, and even resolve IT issues without relying on tech support. “With the call architecture feature, it's super easy for me to just switch something around, add a voice message, change our hours, or add a new line in. So when a client asks, ‘Can you do this?’, I say, ‘Yes, of course we can!’ And then I fix it myself. It's been really great to have that dynamic available,” said Layton.

“By introducing an element of competition, enabling our agents to see their performance data and how it compares to their peers’, and fostering the personal accountability that comes with telecommuting, Vonage’s gamification and remote-work tools drove up our contact center’s productivity by nine to 11 percent,” said Layton.