Massive growth in air travel has enabled Virgin Atlantic to rapidly expand its operations. Yet competition
for passengers has never been greater - putting intense pressure on VAA to not only maintain service
quality levels, but to continue to improve them. This created a number of challenges that the VAA
contact centres needed to address. For example, the cost of transporting voice traffic between centres
was increasing, as was the cost of deploying new centres. Also, managers were struggling to analyse the
data from a mountain of call reports, and turning it into useable information they could act upon to
improve operations was becoming increasingly difficult. Additionally, managers needed to manage
schedule changes and holiday requests for a growing agent population.

To address the high costs of network operations and of deploying new centres, VAA decided to
transition to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) infrastructure and upgrade its contact centre solutions
to help manage its extensive growth. VAA selected Uniphi Connect, an optional module for the Aspect®
CallCenter® ACD to take advantage of the cost savings of SIP based VoIP networks by connecting both
public switch telephone network (PSTN) and IP agents to the Aspect CallCenter ACD and create an
easy migration path to VoIP for future contact centre and remote agent deployments. Uniphi Connect
consists of an agent phone for remote and onsite agents which connects to the ACD via an IP interface
card and provides a consistent interface for all agents, regardless of transport method.

Uniphi Connect now centralises management of all of VAA’s contact centres and remote agents to its
operations in the UK. VAA retains time-division multiplexing (TDM) phones at its contact centres while
enabling 140 home-based agents to move to an IP infrastructure. It is also reducing network traffic costs
when routing calls between contact centres, especially when call volumes are high. By leveraging the
existing Aspect CallCenter ACD using Uniphi Connect, the company can now deploy new centres faster
and more cost effectively without installing new hardware.