Continuing to do business remotely
This insurance group has several thousand branches throughout France, along with call centers for contact with its customers. When the health crisis took effect, there was no question of leaving policy holders in the lurch. Because life goes on: policy holders need to reach their advisors for updates on ongoing cases or to get information on the current situation.
To continue business operations during lockdown and ensure seamless communication with customers, nearly 100% of the group's employees had to start working from home in the space of a few days. The insurer contacted its partner Orange Business with a huge challenge: to enable everyone to access their data, business applications and communication tools as if they were in the office. "So that staff can adopt the office mindset when working from home, the whole network infrastructure and call-taking methods had to be reorganized, so that cases could be handled without impact on policy holders," explains the Orange Business account director leading the project.
So that staff can adopt the office mindset when working from home, the whole network infrastructure and call-taking methods had to be reorganized, so that cases could be handled without impact on policy holders.
Orange Business Account Director and Project Leader
Increasing capacity at a moment's notice
Working from home means mass remote connections. The first response is therefore to boost network infrastructure capacity in order to increase connectivity. The group's decentralized architecture, comprised of a centralized entity and regionalized entities, led it to implement the project in two phases. Firstly, to increase Business VPN access to central data centers from 50% to 100%. Orange Business teams managed this operation and completed it within 48 hours. The second phase entailed doubling regional entities' network accesses, so that employees could connect to the network from home. This step was completed in four days for all entities.
As well as increasing capacity, the security of remote connections was enhanced in partnership with Orange Cyberdefense. The insurer opted for a virtual solution in order to triple secure remote working capacity. This choice delivered valuable time savings as installation took two days rather than the standard three weeks for a hardware solution.
A boost to prevent call peaks
How could all those customer calls be handled? The group, supported by Orange Business teams, boosted capacity and, in the space of three days, deployed a voice infrastructure allowing up to 400 simultaneous calls, thereby avoiding saturation. Additionally, so that call center staff could access their telephone environment from home, it doubled its softphone licenses in 48 hours.
2 days to triple and secure remote working capacity