Lucent TXU Case Study
One Satisfied Customer Leads to Another
One of Lucent’s largest clients, TXU Energy, has a large, complex Avaya telephone system critical to servicing the needs of TXU Energy’s two million customers. Normally, Alcatel-Lucent would work directly with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), in this case Avaya, to provide maintenance and support to their clients. “We had been having our maintenance provided by Avaya for years. We have a very, very complex call center operation,” says Dennis Hale, Alcatel-Lucent Call Center Architect, in reference to TXU Energy’s two 4,000- agent all-IP Avaya contact centers.
Continuant Provides Better Support
“Avaya just could not support us the way we needed to be supported. Trouble tickets would be closed without our knowledge and (there was) inconsistent troubleshooting. We started looking for somebody else, and we found Continuant.” Since 2006, Alcatel-Lucent has used Continuant to help maintain the 15-second-to-answer commitment that they have made for TXU’s Avaya contact centers.
LET CONTINUANT SUPPORT YOU
Continuant has also provided contact center professional services support for TXU. Following the successful migration of TXU’s maintenance contract to Continuant, Alcatel-Lucent decided to move the maintenance of its own Avaya systems to Continuant. Starting in 2005, Continuant has maintained 54 enterprise class Avaya systems throughout the US for Alcatel-Lucent.
Why Choose Continuant
When asked why he selected Continuant, Hale stated, “It’s a whole lot less expensive to go with Continuant over Avaya for maintenance and support.” In reference to Continuant’s technical expertise and high level of availability, Hale added, “The engineers are fantastic. They are all Tier 3 level engineers. You don’t have to go through the step of tier 1, tier 2, tier 3. You always get a tier 3 engineer. They all know our platforms. We love having a single point of contact.”
Virginia Kelly, a colleague of Hale’s, is a Call Center Manager for Alcatel-Lucent who helped make the decision to move to Continuant. When asked why she chose Continuant, Kelly echoes the statements made by Hale. “By the time we reached out to our (previous) service provider, we were past the point of checking to see that our phones were on or if we’d tested to see if all our trunks were up. We really needed a level 3, tier 3 support, and we were not able to go there directly with our Avaya provider, so we were looking for something that could respect our level of expertise, understand what we had already done, and start from that point of troubleshooting without going back to the basics. So these were a couple of the reasons.”