Customer Success - British Telecom

British Telecom Calls on Infragistics Services to Provide Design Guidance for Cutting-Edge Call Center Application

Operating in more than 170 countries, British Telecom is one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services. The company's principal activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services, and higher value broadband and internet products and services.  Download PDF 

The Situation

As a world leader in communications solutions and services, British Telecom expects that all of its internal applications and best practices are in line with its market position. In the Fall of 2010, British Telecom began work on a cutting-edge call center application to significantly reduce call handling time and help customers enjoy British Telecom products faster.

British Telecom turned to long-time partner Infragistics to help the company design a professional-looking, functional user interface that provides a productive and pleasant experience.

"Having worked with Infragistics for many years, we already knew the quality of their UI toolsets and the credentials of their Services experts," said Paul Ballard, director of Software as a Service at British Telecom. "It was natural for us to buzz Infragistics as we designed and developed our new call center application."

The Solution

British Telecom knew it needed a central user interface from which call center agents can log into to view aggregated customer data. In the past, pieces of customer data resided in multiple applications and the agents had to know which applications held which pieces of information and how to use the applications to retrieve the data.

"Our system was not user friendly; it was difficult to access and required immense training," noted Ballard. "We needed a way to visually display enormous amounts of data, quickly and easily that didn’t impede our agents' use of the actual call center application."

Infragistics user experience experts immediately went to work to deliver detailed wireframes, or sketches of the British Telecom Agent Desktop.

First step in the design process was user requirements gathering which included identifying the application users and their expected tasks. With the consumer call center agent, business call center agent and business sales agent identified and their tasks outlined, Infragistics then developed high-level concepts outlining the ideas to be showcased in each of the detailed wireframes.

By defining first the 'what' and then the 'how' Infragistics UX experts know what services should be employed at which process step to yield the highest impact for product quality, engineering efficiency and end-use delight. Calling on numerous years of experience, Infragistics Services helps customers deploy rich, functional, relevant applications that create the best user experiences possible.

The final stage of the Infragistics design process for British Telecom's Agent Desktop Framework included taking the selected concepts, and delivering detailed wireframes that included outlining the organization of the general application framework and delving into scenarios for the three main user groups in order to explain the functionality of the application.

"We needed to add significant UX power with minimum development effort," noted Ballard. "Infragistics Services team helped to accelerate our UI design process and in record time."

The Future

British Telecom's cutting-edge call center application is already in development, using Infragistics recommended UI design as the central aggregation point from which its agents will access customer data quickly and efficiently. Built on Microsoft's Custom Care Framework, British Telecom is deploying its application on Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and already using NetAdvantage for WPF UI controls.

"The range of features included with Infragistics controls mean that our developers spend less time fussing with the UI and more time focused on business logic," concluded Ballard.

British Telecom's cutting-edge call center application is set to debut in Spring of 2011. Stay in touch for more information.

About Infragistics

As the world leader in user interface development tools and experts in User Centered Design, Infragistics empowers developers to build and style immersive user experiences and rich data visualization in line of business applications across all platforms — Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight. Infragistics also has a range of value-added services including UI testing tools, support, training and consulting services. For additional information on Infragistics, products and career opportunities, please visit www.infragistics.com or call us in the U.S. at +1 (800) 231-8588, +1 (609) 448-2000, in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa (EMEA) at +44 (0) 20 8387 1474, or in Japan at +81 (3) 5474-8040.

About British Telecom

Operating in more than 170 countries, British Telecom is one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services. The company's principal activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services, and higher value broadband and internet products and services.