On the receiving end of Miller’s query was his longtime CDW account manager, Kit Halloff. Based in the Phoenix area himself, Halloff had previously worked with Miller and SSA on a wide variety of technology implementations, so he wasn’t surprised to learn that the company was ready to modernize its contact center. “No one wants to be stuck with a technology where functionality is an issue or visibility is poor,” he says. “Their agents were ready for better tools and better all-around integrations.”

After his initial consultation with Miller, Halloff reached out to several contact center vendors and told them the company was interested in reviewing their products. It was important for SSA to try out a variety of competing solutions, and he didn’t want the company to sacrifice quality by rushing the decision-making process. He lined up some leading options, and by the time the team saw and tested everything, “it was probably four or five months,” he says. “They knew it wasn’t smart to cut corners if they wanted to be successful in the end.”

Eventually, the SSA team returned to CDW with its verdict: Of the solutions they tried, they were most impressed with Zoom, and they were ready to move forward with implementation. “The fact that Zoom offers everything in one package really resonated with them,” Halloff recalls. “They’d get their contact center and phone system functions through the same application, and that was appealing to everyone.”

At that point, Halloff and Miller decided to bring key stakeholders together in the same room. That included the senior managers responsible for SSA’s communications operations, as well as representatives from Zoom and two additional consultants from CDW.

John Klein, a senior collaboration specialist, flew in from his office in Colorado, joining senior solutions architect Richard Eddy, a top authority on standing up new contact centers. “It was a chance for us to hear about the challenges the company faced and then how Zoom might help specifically,” Eddy explains. “You want to know exactly what the problem is before you start exploring the possible solutions.”

During that all-hands meeting, Miller and his contact center colleagues spelled out in detail the issues they’d faced. At the top of the list was their current system’s lack of artificial intelligence capabilities and native workforce-management functionality. Critically, they also hoped to leverage analytics, a toolset that was missing from their legacy technology.

They liked certain Zoom tools such as live chat and video messaging that came built-in with the solution, and they especially appreciated that it provided real-time reporting on contact center operations. “They really wanted to reduce hold times for plan members who called in and improve the overall customer experience,” Klein notes.

As an integrated platform, Zoom combines Unified Communications as a Service UCaaS and Contact Center as a Service CCaaS solutions in a single suite, which means internal collaboration tools for phone and video conferencing stand side by side with features designed to streamline customer interactions. The system offers a workforce management solution and customer relationship management integrations, and it includes omnichannel functionality for users across voice, video, SMS, chat and email.

“One big reason we liked their contact center and that it's accessed through the Zoom Workplace app,” Miller says, explaining that this eliminates potential problems such as web-browser crashes and latency spikes. He also points to the system’s agent helper tool, Zoom AI Expert Assist, which includes an Information Retrieval feature that lets agents pull details from third-party systems to meet the needs of customers. The Recommended Dispositions feature documents the outcomes of customer interactions.

Finally, Miller notes, Zoom AI Companion is an AI-enabled digital assistant that works across the entire platform. The solution can answer agent questions and generate meeting summaries, and it even has a tool for translating agent-customer chats into multiple languages in real time. It also includes a live sentiment analysis feature that representatives can use to analyze customer engagement, “so if the conversation starts to go sideways, it will offer suggestions on how to handle it,” he says.

With SSA ready for its new solution, the CDW team agreed with the company that it would be best to take a “crawl-walk-run” approach to the implementation. They’d first focus on the launch of Zoom Phone, and later, after the benefits enrollment season, they’d add on the contact center enhancements. Klein, Eddy and Halloff worked closely with Miller to develop a strategic plan for the deployment, and training was provided to SSA staff to show them how to use the new technology.

With the project fully implemented, CDW continues to provide managed services to SSA on an as-needed basis, notes Klein. “Cameron’s team is very experienced, so it made sense that we’d just get them started,” he explains. “If they ever need help, they know we’re available and ready to answer their questions.”

Miller says he appreciates that flexibility, and also notes that he couldn’t be happier with how the project proceeded. “We went into this knowing there had to be a better way, and now we’ve found it,” he says. “It’s exciting to think about what we’ll eventually be able to do as we really put this system to work.”