Spirent Communications plc Improves the Customer Experience and Web Self Service by Using a Knowledge Management Platform

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• Oracle Customer:  Spirent Communications plc
  Location:  Sunnyvale, CA
  Industry:  Communications
  Employees:  1,500
  Annual Revenue:  $500 Million to $1 Billion
  

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Spirent Communications works behind the scenes to help the world communicate and collaborate faster, better, and more often. The world’s leading communications companies rely on Spirent Communications to help design, develop, validate, and deliver world-class network, devices, and services. The company offers an extensive portfolio of solutions to test data centers, cloud computing environments, high speed Ethernet networks and services, 3G/4G wireless networks and devices, network security, and global navigation satellite systems. Today, Spirent is helping to test the first deployments of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) networks globally, including Asia, Europe, and North America.

Spirent’s customers require high levels of support for a diverse and complex product portfolio, and the company is committed to delivering on this requirement. Spirent needed a solution to help its customers get the information they need quickly and at their convenience through its Web site. It also wanted to optimize support engineers’ productivity by allowing them to direct more time and resources toward high priority and highly complex issues. Limited search capabilities on the legacy support portal drove customers to open cases with Spirent Support Services and its highly trained support engineers, even for the most basic inquiries. Support engineers often faced similar challenges locating the information needed to answer customer questions, as they lacked an efficient way to find, share and distribute knowledge across the company’s many information silos.

After evaluating several solutions, Spirent Communications selected and deployed Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service Enterprise Edition. The Oracle platform uses natural language processing to understand the true intent of each inquiry logged via the support portal’s search function. The Spirent Knowledge Base on the company’s Customer Support Center (CSC) finds the best possible answer using search enhancement features―such as communications industry-specific libraries and federation to search external sources.

Spirent Communications uses the platform to provide customers with an information-rich, high-performance self-service experience that keeps them coming back to its site when they need support. The company has reduced contact center call volume while better serving its customers. Each time a customer uses the knowledge base, they find answers faster than by calling, and it saves Spirent an average of US$210 per call―which is significant when multiplied across the thousands of calls received monthly. It also gained the ability to redirect, in the first six months that the system was live, between US$300,000 and US$1.4 million in support staff time from lower-value support calls to higher-value complex issues, with support center calls avoided thanks to better online support.

Further, Spirent Communications gave support engineers the tools they needed to rapidly find answers to a wide variety of customer inquiries, enabling the company to scale without adding additional support engineers.

Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service Enterprise Edition was instrumental in helping Spirent Communications become a strong adopter and advocate for Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS)—a methodology and a set of practices and processes that focus on knowledge as a key asset of the customer/technical support organization.