Background
Headquartered in Shenzen, China, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. is a world-leading technology-powered retail financial services group. With over 200 million retail customers and 516 million Internet users, Ping An is one of the largest financial services companies in the world.
For further information visit the Ping An website.
Challenges
Ping An has been a loyal customer of AudioCodes for several years. Over the years, the company successfully deployed AudioCodes SBCs and gateways in several locations around the world to provide reliable and secure voice connectivity between its on-premises Avaya PBXs, its Genesys SIP Server based contact center and local PSTN operators.
In early 2020, the Covid-19 epidemic brought about a major and sudden shift in the working environments of companies all over the world. Ping An was no exception. Forced to close its offices, the company needed to ensure that its contact center was still able to handle calls from customers efficiently and reliably during the crisis.
Almost overnight, thousands of contact center agents were instructed to work from home. Ping An required an effective solution to build the infrastructure needed to cope with the extra call load, while maintaining high voice quality, reliability and data security. With little prior notice to make the change, Ping An had to have the new setup up and running in a very short time.
Challenges
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Move Genesys contact center agents to work-at home mode
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Deliver reliable and high-quality voice services for work-at-home agents
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Rapid deployment of the service
“AudioCodes SBCs were able to rapidly deliver a highly secure and reliable voice connectivity solution to ensure that our agents could continue operating seamlessly from home with minimal disruption to our service.”
Solution
With so much of its voice infrastructure already based on AudioCodes equipment, it was natural for Ping An to turn to AudioCodes for the solution to its work at home agent (WAHA) needs. AudioCodes Mediant SBCs are fully interoperable with Genesys SIP Server and deliver robust security, data encryption and high availability.
For the WAHA deployment, Ping An selected two AudioCodes SBC models: the hardware-based Mediant 4000 and the software-only Mediant Virtual Edition (VE). Each Mediant 4000 can support up to 5,000 concurrent sessions, while the VE SBC supports up to 24,000 per instance. Ping An deployed the Mediant 4000 in its main data center and the VE in its own private cloud environment. The SBCs were deployed in a high availability configuration to ensure maximum reliability.
Ping An’s work-at-home agents switched to using the Genesys SIP Phone software client instead of the desk phones normally used in the regular office environment. The SIP Phone registers with the Genesys SIP Server via the AudioCodes SBC over a public internet connection. The SBCs provide encryption of both the SIP signaling and media streams (SRTP) to ensure voice and data security.
The SBCs also act as voice quality monitoring probes within the network. This enables Ping An to analyze the voice traffic and rapidly identify any voice impairments which may lead to service degradation or interruptions.
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Mediant VE/SE SBC
Scalable solution for enterprises and service providers looking to virtualize their infrastructure and harmonize their datacenters on commodity server hardware.
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Mediant 4000 SBC
The AudioCodes Mediant 4000 is a session border controller (SBC) designed for deployment in large organizations and as an access SBC for service providers.
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Results
Thanks to the rapid response from AudioCodes, the ease of deployment and the full interoperability with Genesys, Ping An was able to deploy the work-at-home solution in a matter of days. By the middle of February 2020 (less than three weeks after the directive for homeworking had been issued by the Chinese government), the company’s contact center was operating at 50% capacity (significantly higher than the national average). By mid-March, the contact center was almost back to a fully operational state.
“Particularly in times of crisis, it is vital that our contact center can provide a normal service to our customers seeking assistance,” said Yun Cheng Hui, Head of the Contact Center Operation Team at Ping An. “AudioCodes SBCs were able to rapidly deliver a highly secure and reliable voice connectivity solution to ensure that our agents could continue operating seamlessly from home with minimal disruption to our service.”
