2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Bell Canada

Managed IP Telephony Support Centre

With a complement of 42,000 people, Bell Canada provides local telephone, long distance, wireless communications, Internet access, data, satellite television and other services to residential and business customers through its 27 million customer connections.

The company operates primarily as the incumbent telephone company in Ontario and Quebec through Bell, Télébec and NorthernTel; in Atlantic Canada through Aliant, and in Canada's northern territories through Norwestel. It also operates as a local exchange carrier in Alberta and British Columbia through Bell West. Bell Canada is wholly owned by BCE Inc., Canada's largest communications company.

Rapid evolution is the hallmark of the telecommunications industry as it migrates to Internet protocol (IP)-based communications that accommodate text, video, sound and voice within a single integrated network. The market for IP-based communications is already highly competitive.

Bell Canada introduced its IP telephony service in 2004 and is determined to set the IP standard for its customers and the industry.

Challenges

Bell needed trained employees to be able to deliver its new service to both residential and business customers. It established an extensive internal project to make 5,000 employees in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal proficient users of the company's new Managed IP Telephony solution. This user group; a cross-section of employees from sales, enterprise support and technology functions, would gain an understanding of the customer experience and use their expertise to support enterprise and residential clients once the service was launched.

The entire IP migration project, including employee training, was scheduled to occur between April and September 2004. In addition to the demands of upgrading the technical platform for the migration from Centrex to IP telephony, defining a solution for providing product training for 5,000 employees at one time in French and English presented a significant challenge.

The tight schedule made traditional classroom training impractical and set the stage for a technology-based solution, a virtual support centre. Course content would need to include 3,000 pages of product information and hundreds of screen captures that required translation from English to French. Content would have to be accessible quickly via a database management system. The budget for the virtual support centre component of the project was established at $350,000.

Solution

On schedule and within budget, a Montreal-based Web site development firm, Alogia, responded with a virtual support centre based on an architecture composed of workstations and services connected by Bell Canada's intranet and accessible by internal project participants in three cities.

Employees access the site using a workstation equipped with a Web browser. The site welcomes them, provides updates on the project, validates their registration using an access code and provides online IP technology training for the new handsets, IP software and expanded features.

By accessing interactive bilingual material and more than 120 online training capsules, users can train themselves at their own convenience and in their own language. They can also ask questions and receive answers in real time. The system's administrative features automatically survey employee satisfaction and measure the project's performance by tracking the number of employees that have effectively used the support centre.

The support centre has advanced Bell's competitive position within the lucrative IP telephony market. The site has proved so successful with employees that several enterprise clients are already using it. Equally compelling is the reduction in operating costs the company has realized from the automation of expensive, labour-intensive functions.

The deployment of online training capsules instead of live instructors saved $2.9 million. Using an online response system to answer employee queries saved an additional $13,000. Based on a comparison between traditional training and support costs for a group of this size and the costs associated with the IP hosted solution, Bell estimates its return on investment at 846 per cent.

"The fact that all the team members involved with this project gave 110 per cent was the most significant success factor in achieving this challenge," says André Boutet, business analyst (processes and systems), IP platforms; who was project lead for the IP migration project.

"They cooperated to redefine and create processes that enabled the implementation of this new technology within Bell Canada. This, in turn, enabled us to better understand what all our customers will face when migrating to IP telephony and provided us with a tremendous opportunity for gaining knowledge that we will be able to transfer to our clients."

Innovative Use of Technology

Alogia used an agile development methodology based on fourth-generation development tools to accelerate the system implementation. The online training component of the system is supplied by Flash animated capsules with integrated narration. Both the content and the capsules are stored in and managed from Alogia's Cameleon content-management system, which permits content to be changed and added easily. Capsules communicate with that system via a Web server.

This project was developed in C# language supported by Microsoft's .Net framework. The Alogia team also used Microsoft's database management system.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, Bell Canada has been awarded a 2005 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Efficiency and Operational Improvements, For Profit category.

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