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IRMC provides customer management solutions specializing in collections, accounts receivable management, and customer retention services through its global call center network of nearly 6,000 employees. The IRMC family of companies includes Allied Interstate and First Contact in the United States; Canadian Bonded Credits Limited (CBCL) in Canada; Legal and Trade Collections, Legal and Trade Financial Services, Reachflow and Revenues Management Services in the United Kingdom; IntelliRisk Philippines, Inc. in the Philippines; and IntelliRisk Management India Pvt. Ltd. in India.
THE CHALLENGE
Because IRMC has call centers and clients all over the globe that must be supported with computer-telephony integration, continued growth drove the company to reevaluate its client-server-based IT strategy. IRMC needed greater speed and flexibility in meeting the needs of its collections and financial services industry clients, who often requested rapid rollout of additional agents or programs in different sites around the world. It needed to deliver personalized desktops to end users while managing the support costs of those desktops. Ultimately, it wanted to support an “any agent, any desk, anywhere” strategy that it could use to differentiate itself against less flexible competitors in the sales process.
THE STRATEGY
IRMC’s technology team developed a plan to centralize IRMC data center operations and provide agents around the world with virtual terminals to connect to the data center. The team explored a number of technology options including solutions from Citrix and VMware and selected VMware for a number of reasons: __ VMware would enable the technology team to centrally manage all virtual desktops around the world and ensure appropriate redundancy, security, disaster recovery, and isolation as needed.
VMware enabled IRMC to give each agent an individualized desktop based on his or her sign-in information, instead of some other solutions that required a specific workstation or a specific address.
__ VMware was competitively priced.
__ VMware would enable IRMC to redeploy a number of IT staff because they would not be needed for provisioning new machines and managing the imaging of new desktops at individual call center sites. Because the technology team already had considerable experience with VMware, the team was able to build the environment on its own in two weeks. Agents received three days of training on using the new system. Over the first few weeks, the technology team monitored the project and performed some fine tuning and balancing to optimize performance.
KEY BENEFIT AREAS
Deploying the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure enabled IRMC to support its sales strategy, which was to differentiate itself based on flexibility and agility, while managing IT costs. Key benefits IRMC achieved from the project include:
__ Increased flexibility. Moving away from PCs to virtual machines increased the flexibility so IRMC can optimize management of its call centers without additional cost.
__ Faster provisioning. The ability to rapidly configure desktops to meet changing or new client needs enabled IRMC to shorten the ramp-up time needed to support new clients.
__ Redeployed IT staff. Because of the flexibility and speed of provisioning, 20 IT staff members that used to be required on site to manage the imaging of machines — sometimes on an overtime basis — could be redeployed to more productive IT functions.
__ Reduced IT costs. Virtualization with VMware enabled IRMC to eliminate the cost of distributed data centers and the ongoing cost of upgrading agents’ computers.
__ Improved competitiveness. Because IRMC could deliver new call center projects faster and more readily than before, it could use that as a differentiator in the sales process.
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