Asurion - Oracle E-SBCs Boost Contact Center … E-SBCs Boost Contact Center Reliability and Economics ... Oracle E-SBCs Boost Contact Center Reliability and Economics - Case study

Asurion Oracle E-SBCs Boost Contact Center Reliability and Economics

Asurion, a global leader in consumer electronics support services, uses Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controllers to ensure high availability and service quality for its mission-critical contact center. The Oracle solution streamlines multi-vendor interoperability and enables highly reliable and cost-effective SIP-based communications. Overview

Asurian provides over 280 million consumers around the world with device protection and

support services for smartphones, tablets, and other electronic devices. When a product is

missing or simply doesn't work properly, Asurion’s 16,000 employees are focused on solving

the problem with people and processes operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week,

speaking six languages, and working across any device, platform, or provider. Leading

retailers, mobile operators and pay-tv providers across the globe partner with Asurion to

deliver product protection and support.

As a support services organization, Asurion’s contact center is the lifeblood of the business.

Dependable, high-quality telephony services are critical for success. The company’s legacy

multi-vendor contact center environment included Avaya PBXs, Cisco IVR systems and a

variety of geographically distributed ACD systems—all connected via the PSTN. The

incumbent implementation was becoming increasingly expensive to operate. Asurion was

spending $1 million annually on carrier “take back and transfer fees” as calls were redirected

across the PSTN. The IT organization sought to consolidate communications systems and

introduce SIP trunking services to reduce operations expense and complexity. But like many

organizations, Asurion encountered multi-vendor interoperability and service interworking

issues along the way.

“Oracle Enterprise Session Border

Controllers and SIP trunking

services have helped us eliminate

$1 million a year in PSTN take

back and transfer fees.”

MIKE HERMAN

SENIOR PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT

ASURION

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“Our contact center implementation was extremely diverse,” explains Mike Herman,

Senior Principal Architect for Asurion. “We have communications platforms from a

number of different vendors and we were planning to use a variety of SIP trunking

service providers to balance costs. Our pilot testing revealed subtle protocol variations

across the different system components and trunking services.”

Oracle E-SBCs Accelerate Time-to-Value

After evaluating a number of potential solutions, including options from Cisco and Avaya,

Herman selected Oracle Enterprise-Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) to accelerate the

transition to the new SIP-based architecture. “The Oracle E-SBCs make it really easy for us

to overcome interoperability barriers,” says Herman. “We use the product’s Header

Manipulation Rules to normalize SIP messages and eliminate incompatibilities. We also use

HMRs to assign a unique ID to each session so we can track calls throughout their lifecycle

and convey meaningful information to our contact center agents.”

Oracle E-SBCs now serve as the termination point for Asurion’s SIP trunking services in

North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The company leverages fully redundant,

geographically distributed E-SBC configurations on each continent to ensure continuous

service availability. “The Oracle E-SBCs help us optimize service quality, reliability and

economics,” says Herman. “We can route calls across data centers and service providers to

contain costs, circumvent equipment failures or network outages, and perform non-disruptive

system upgrades.” With the redundant network design, the IT organization can easily move

calls across data centers to carry out maintenance functions without impacting the business.

Challenges

» Mitigate IP communications interoperability and service interworking challenges

» Support a wide range of communications systems, vendors and service providers

» Ensure high availability and service quality for IP-based communications

» Satisfy future service expansion and technology plans.

Solution

» Oracle E-SBCs normalize SIP messages across vendors and service providers

» Extensible Header Manipulation Rules provide a high degree of flexibility

» Redundant E-SBC configurations ensure continuous service availability

» Wide-ranging product family addresses diverse scale and price-performance requirements

Why Oracle

“The Oracle solution was far more flexible and scalable than the Avaya and Cisco products

we investigated at the time,” explains Herman. “Thanks to Oracle we were able to tie a

diverse collection of PBXs, IVRs and ACDs into a new SIP-based framework—quickly and

easily. With SIP trunks we avoid about $1 million a year in PSTN take back and transfer

fees.”

“We could not be happier with our Oracle investment,” says Herman. “The products have

delivered virtually continuous service availability since 2013. And the customer support has

been outstanding from day one. The Oracle support reps are incredibly knowledgeable and

responsive. As a support services company, we certainly appreciate the value of an

experienced, customer-focused support organization.”