Executive background
Maersk needed a robust and reliable network to service its customer calls from across the globe. It was also looking for a solution to better manage the call resolution, while bringing down the costs.
 
Company background
Maersk Line, a leading liner shipping company, is a part of the A P Moller - Maersk Group which has its headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark and is present in more than 125 countries. Its fleet includes 470 container vessels and more than 1.9 million containers ensuring a reliable and comprehensive worldwide coverage. Maersk Line’s feeder vessels, trucks and dedicated trains offer the unique concept of door-to-door services.

Apart from container shipping activities the group is also involved in logistics and terminal operation, tankers, oil and gas activities, retail, shipyards and manufacturing activities.
 
Business challenge
Maersk’s IT infrastructure is supremely critical to the smooth running of its day-to-day business operations. The business needs to track the status of its various containers across the world and be able to convey the same to the customers. Maersk has built e-commerce solutions to provide users "round the clock", up-to-date information about the status of their containers, cargo, etc.

Maersk India wanted a highly available IT network to enable them to run applications that would help them do their job with the highest possible accuracy and speed, and at the same time reduce costs. The company wanted to create a redundant network architecture that would eliminate network downtime caused by any single point of failure.
 
“We needed high availability of our network, so that even if one network failed, the other could takeover and ensure smooth functioning of business activities,” says Rajesh Nair, CIO, Maersk India.

For this the company wanted to partner with a service provider who could understand and analyse the business needs, help in technology selection and suggest the appropriate network architecture, choose the product as well as provide end-to-end service delivery.
 
Cisco was an obvious chose as Maersk’s global offices were already using solutions from the company. Cisco along with its Gold Premium Partner, Datacraft recommended that with the new redundant network, Maersk could opt for Cisco IPCC contact centre solution and IP Telephony solutions to smoothen out customer service operations in a cost effective manner.
 
Solution
Cisco and Datacraft teams designed and deployed a reliable IP-based network with redundant architecture ensuring that there would be no single point of failure. Maersk India decided to deploy Cisco’s IP Contact Centre (IPCC) and IP Telephony (IPT) solutions. The deployment of these solutions was done in Chennai and Pune as these two locations serve as Global Service Centres or GSCs for the company. Cisco and Datacraft played critical roles in understanding, designing, deploying and maintaining the entire solution.
 
“The deployment was critical as most of our business across the globe (remote support) is managed through these two GSCs,” says Nair. The deployment was done in three months. Nair adds that skill-based routing was also an important criterion in the deployment process. The Cisco solutions enabled the routing of calls based on the complexity of customer issue and forward it to the agent best equipped to answer him quickly.
 
“There were some challenges like dependency of certain equipments but Datacraft helped us sail through with their expertise and support,” says Nair.
 
For any new configuration and troubleshooting issues, engineers from Datacraft would go onsite while for routing and switching related problems, it provided L1 and L2 support for hardware to Maersk. In case Datacraft could not solve the problem, it was escalated to Cisco.
 
Business value
Cisco and Datacraft’s analysis of Maersk’s business process showed that not everyone at the company’s GSCs required a dedicated phone line. Cisco recommended that a virtual cluster phone environment could be created wherein multiple users could use the same phone. This translated in significant cost savings for Maersk.
 
Maersk also took benefit of Cisco’s virtualised call centre offering that helps in routing calls to contact centre agents independent of their location. This solution has helped the company to service customers even when agents are out of service or work hours as they can address issues even on the move or from home.