Ten years before the pandemic hit, BroadPath began optimizing contact centers for remote work, and when COVID-19 was in full gear they were prepared with a radically different work-from-home business model. This is the story of how a business process outsourcing (BPO) company transformed their IT infrastructure to capitalize on new opportunities and better serve some of the largest U.S. healthcare payers and providers right when they needed it most.
Talk to Kevin Arts, Director of Information Technology, and you’ll quickly learn that making contact centers actually work at home is a lot more complex than brick-and-mortar centers. “With medicare and HIPAA compliance, you have to have service reliability and stability, and security is paramount. After all, our job is the transfer of sensitive medical information every single day,” he explained.
“I can move traffic between our customers and pull circuits from retiring customers and add them to new customers. This helped me prove the value, and now we’re converting more circuits to Masergy”
Kevin Arts
Director of IT at BroadPath
Connecting home agents to healthcare companies requires many systems to work seamlessly together, and performance is key for BroadPath’s own Bhive system, the virtual workplace tool providing video conferencing, collaboration, and security. Traditionally, BroadPath used VPN technology to connect their agents, relying on their healthcare client’s network and applications, but that proved difficult with public internet connectivity and so many client networks to manage. “Performance issues were affecting revenue. When agents aren’t on the phone we can’t bill the customer,” said Arts.
Recognizing that BroadPath needed a more reliable way to connect home agents, executives asked Arts to rethink their global network. If BroadPath could solve the connectivity problem, the company could open new doors of opportunity, and as it turns out, the solution arrived just as opportunity came knocking.
Arts had experience leveraging Masergy’s software-defined network to transfer 100 MG bidirectional video calls across the globe, so he trusted Masergy to again design a similar solution for BroadPath.
The pilot program was compared against other network connections in place with a Tier-1 carrier. “I was able to quickly show that our existing point-to-point circuits were less resilient than doing a layer-three MPLS connection from Masergy to the client,” he explained.
Comparisons revealed no outages with Masergy versus a 92% uptime with the point-to-point circuits. Moreover, Masergy’s service offered a cost savings of 46% per circuit. It offered better flexibility too. “I can move traffic between our customers and pull circuits from retiring customers and add them to new customers,” Arts said. With a 3-year contract, he also avoids 1-year premium pricing and network change penalty fees. “This helped me prove the value, and now we’re converting more circuits to Masergy.”
BroadPath previously had countless solutions running on many client networks, but today the company is unifying IT operations around one environment. That simplicity is groundbreaking for several reasons. First it simplifies data management, vendor management, and security. “We are no longer considering investing millions of dollars in owning our own Citrix application. Now, we use Masergy’s direct interconnection to our customers’ Citrix, which means there’s one database that holds all customer information,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about outside integrations.”
That simplicity is also groundbreaking because when COVID-19 hit, BroadPath had the right solutions in place to grow their business with confidence. And grow it did — business quadrupled! “Today, all the biggest healthcare companies realize that we are already doing everything they want to do, and they’re bringing us in,” he said. “We don’t have to struggle now to do phone calls, video, and all these applications that the healthcare industry requires. Now, we have our own private network to back our unique work-from-home business model.”
Recognized results
Since deploying hundreds of home agents under the Masergy IT platform, Arts has recognized efficiencies of scale. Reporting is a breeze using Masergy’s management portal. “Every month I owe our customers reports showing uptime, downtime, and traffic. I just go to the circuit and grab the report. It saves so much time compared to the manual work with our other vendor,” he said.
Productivity is apparent all across the IT department. “I don’t have a lot of people power to get everything done. When I have a link that goes down with a major Tier 1 carrier, we’re on the phone for 8-10 hours at a time trying to get the status. But with Masergy, we haven’t had any outages, and they own the relationship with the carrier. They do all the work. So, my staff is free to continue doing their jobs,” Arts said.
That time savings comes in handy during special projects, like the time when one healthcare client asked all its BPO partners to connect directly to its Amazon Web Services cloud. While other BPOs on the call were uncertain about establishing that connection, Art was not. He invited Masergy to the meeting, because he knew his partner connected to AWS all the time. In fact, the process was so fast and easy that BroadPath impressed the client — their AWS project is well ahead of schedule. “I stay with Masergy because the value they bring is like no other in the market. No one can compete with what they do. All our Masergy solutions have been flawless.”
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