Twilio answers Moneypenny’s call for a more intelligent customer comms platform
- Summary:
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MoneyPenny is a fast growing digital comms provider for customers in the UK and US. It recently ripped out its core systems to move to Twilio.
As Moneypenny states on its company website - "most people have spoken to Moneypenny, few realise it". The company was created back in 2000 and offers services for its customers that range from digital and outsourced switchboards, to phone system products, as well as live chat. It now handles 15 million calls and chats on behalf of its 13,000 customers annually.
So when Moneypenny decided to change its core telephony and CRM platform, it wasn't taken lightly. As CTO Pete Hanlon says, the project was like "open heart surgery".
Up until two years ago, Moneypenny had been using an ageing Mitel platform, which Hanlon explains was more suited to an on-premise office environment, but wasn't compatible with a company that is seeking expansion and scale.
The company has since migrated to Twilio for its core VoIP platform - using Twilio's Flex product - and has also developed its own CRM solution on top of the Twilio platform. It also now hosts its services on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform - with Hanlon describing the company as truly digital and cloud-based. Hanlon says:
Prior to the move to Twilio we were using an old Mitel system. And that was very much an old-school set-up that worked within an office. So if we wanted to move into different offices or change geographical location we would need a new Mitel system. We would have to implement our own DR, failover type solutions for our telephony platform. So it came with a fair amount of overhead from a maintenance and support perspective, but it was also about serving an office - and that doesn't match with what we want to do as a business. We want to grow. We are expanding all the time.
And of course we wanted the flexibility of voice over IP (VoIP). And really the flexibility to take advantage of a lot of the capabilities that exist within the Twilio platform; things like skills-based routing. So routing to someone that has a high skill of legal, or a high skill of estate agents, so that they can handle those calls more effectively.
A data-driven system
Moneypenny began the migration to Twilio just under two years ago and as noted above, it was a slow, carefully managed project - given what was at stake. However, it is now live and successfully operating with 700 of Moneypenny active users.
Hanlon said that Moneypenny executed the project by taking one specialist area at a time - such as its legal, healthcare and estate agent divisions - to understand what capabilities were needed for the new platform. One of the biggest challenges from migrating to Twilio - as one of the opportunities, says Hanlon - is that the platform has more opportunities for Moneypenny to make use of data and metrics. He says:
I think the big challenge with any of these things is measuring from one system to another, when the metrics change. What we found with Twilio is that we got an awful lot more metrics about how the system was behaving, what was working well, and we didn't have those metrics in the old Mitel system. Our challenge was trying to get as much as we could out of the old Mitel system to compare against the new Twilio system. What we found during the migration was that the level of insight we get from Twilio was far superior and really helped us to optimise the rollout.
For example, Moneypenny got information about how long calls take, the various stages of the call, how long calls were ringing for, how long a call wrap would take, the amount of speech that was happening on the call, etc. As a result, Moneypenny has greater insight into how effective each call is.
Hanlon adds:
Our level of insight into what's going on has gone up a hundredfold. We have an awful lot more data around how people are operating, around what's working well, what we can tweak to improve. I think what Twilio has brought to the table from an organisational perspective is the flexibility to innovate on things far more easily. The ease of development within Twilio has really helped to speed up our innovation internally.
COVID-19
Unsurprisingly, Moneypenny has been central to many of its customers during the ongoing COVID-19 health pandemic, as companies have to respond to their customers queries about continuing operations. Hanlon says that some of MoneyPenny's customers' calls have gone through the roof.
Luckily, because Moneypenny's systems are cloud-based and make use of VoIP, the company was able to easily implement its business continuity plan and work from home policies. In addition to this, Moneypenny is making use of AWS WorkSpaces to securely control the work being done. Hanlon explains:
We have always had the capability to work from home, so really it was easy to implement our BCP and use the home working solution. And the way that we've done that is leverage the flexibility of Twilio, in the sense that it's VoIP and we can deploy that wherever we need to. But we also have security and compliance we need to adhere to.
The way that we did that was through AWS Workspaces. So we are connecting to a virtual machine in the cloud and that is running the VoIP software and the CRM. That allows us to implement things like tight DLP controls and to make sure all the controls we would otherwise have in the office are there.
Essentially AWS becomes our stretch office. So it gives us a lot of comfort that we are able to put people into a home working situation, but do it in a way that maintains our contractual obligations.