For ResultsCX, a business process outsourcing (BPO) company, keeping up with shifting customer expectations means acting with agility. ResultsCX provides call-center technology and staffing services for brands in nine key verticals, including top-level telecoms, major healthcare providers, big insurance companies, and online retailers. It supports many Fortune 500 companies, handling more than 71 million customer service calls a year, managing automated support bots, and analyzing data.
With Azure Virtual Desktop in place, we can actually give faster turnaround times than the timing requested by our customers. And that ability is revenue influencing.
Arthur Burt: Chief Information Security Officer, Senior Vice President
ResultsCX
With more than 30 years of experience, ResultsCX has built a reputation for qualified resources, solid technology, on-demand support, expert consulting services, and exceptional customer experiences. And the company understands the urgent need to continually evolve, enhance, and update its digital services.
Historically, ResultsCX installed and managed the necessary hardware and software on-premises at its own or its customers’ call centers. That came with the high maintenance, repair, and replacement costs associated with all those workstations, monitors, headsets, and network connections. The company wanted to develop new remote and hybrid models for staffing and equipping call centers to deliver outstanding customer service value.
Embracing the cloud
ResultsCX had an on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment to support its customer engagement platform, but it found that environment difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. The ResultsCX IT team wanted a more flexible solution that would not require a lot of resources to run but would scale easily as necessary.
“We were looking for a solution that would allow us to speed up our deployments and build on our goals for the future,” says Arthur Burt, Chief Information Security Officer and Senior Vice President at ResultsCX. “We needed to support our strategy to become a more innovative, digital-forward business.”
So to reduce infrastructure, device, and shipping costs, reimagine the user experience for its customers, and replace complexity and churn with simplicity and flow, ResultsCX adopted Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop. The company used this cloud-based desktop and app virtualization service to retain and integrate its existing platforms and offer a new, highly secure way to connect employees to everything they need in a workstation—from almost any location on any number of devices.
With Azure Virtual Desktop, the company stores its data in a controlled environment in the cloud and remotely pushes virtual desktops to almost any device in a matter of minutes. No information is stored on the device itself, so ResultsCX administrators can quickly and securely make any computer into a ResultsCX workstation.
Even with simplified device setup, it’s hard to take the complexity out of managing thousands of devices—keeping up with updates, patches, and monitoring for alerts and issues. To gain flexibility, ResultsCX also adopted Microsoft Intune so that it can handle device configuration management from the cloud. Using FSLogix profile containers with Azure Virtual Desktop, ResultsCX established a connection via Azure ExpressRoute to one of its on-premises datacenters to collect resources that are often needed by call center agents. This greatly improved network stability and resiliency so that the company can readily accommodate the increased data transmitting back and forth from the cloud.
Saving time and money with automation
By using FSLogix to roam profiles in Azure Virtual Desktop and store complete user profiles in a single container, ResultsCX can automatically create Azure Active Directory accounts when onboarding new team members, and it can remove users from the system with ease, all while meeting customer requirements like Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) certifications. The company uses Windows Autopilot to quickly configure devices from the cloud. “This was huge to us,” says Burt. “With Azure Virtual Desktop, we’ve reduced our onboarding and offboarding time down from two weeks to two days.”
Through FSLogix, ResultsCX employees can have roaming profiles stored in Azure storage accounts that are connected to the same virtual networks they use signing in. That supports seamless replication and addition of devices, in any region, without fear of affecting the employee—their data roams with them.
Building confidence through flexibility
After setting up its Azure-based cloud environment, ResultsCX has watched the positive effects extend from individual employees to teams and to customers. Even the smallest changes, like standardizing the company’s browser experience, have made a difference. With a curated catalogue of tools now at every employee’s fingertips, collaboration is increasing among teams, no matter where they work.
“Azure Virtual Desktop plays a big part in the story of how we can launch and support and maintain a work-at-home population with confidence,” says Jamie Vernon, Senior Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Operations at ResultsCX. According to Vernon, having a dedicated Microsoft team available for support bolsters that confidence, for the company and for its customers. “They went from skeptics to believers.”
Adds Tommy Orr, Manager of IT Infrastructure at ResultsCX, “By incorporating Azure Virtual Desktop into a comprehensive environment of Microsoft systems and tools, we have built the seamless user experience we were looking for. On top of that, we introduced a high level of security for every user. Our relationship with Microsoft has really been the perfect fit.”
Making an impact
Today, ResultsCX provides next-generation customer experience solutions while maintaining resiliency and responding with greater agility. With the ability to scale up and down quickly, the company can immediately give employees what they need—while continuing to cut costs. Its optimized Virtual Desktop platform has allowed the company to reduce its cost per user by more than two-thirds.
“Customers used to ask us what we could do for them in six weeks. Six weeks became four and then two or three,” says Vernon. “Now, we have all we need for our teams to deliver really quickly.”
Burt adds, “With Azure Virtual Desktop in place, we can actually give faster turnaround times than the timing requested by our customers. And that ability is revenue influencing.”
ResultsCX can now consistently deliver beyond expectations even while customer demand continues to grow, and its leaders predict that it will go on setting a precedent for service in the BPO industry.
“When we do something cool and unique—like offering such a high degree of security and scalability through Virtual Desktop with Microsoft by our side—we quickly see our competitors getting pressured to do the same,” says Vernon. “What we do forces everybody else to accelerate.”