TELUS International migrates key customer experience app to Google Cloud

As more services and applications go online, ensuring a frictionless customer experience is vital to building brand loyalty, capturing more sales, and optimizing profits. But if your underlying technology isn’t reliable, it’s easy to lose customers to the competition. 

For TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience innovator, ensuring the reliability of its online tools and services is crucial to its team’s mission to design, build, and deliver high-tech, high-touch customer experiences for some of the world’s most respected brands. 

TELUS International bundles Verint, a Google Cloud Partner and workforce-management application, with its Cloud Contact Center platform to help North American call centers optimize customer service activities on the phone and online. TELUS International also uses Verint’s solution internally for its business process outsourcing.

So, as part of its own digital transformation journey, TELUS International migrated Verint—a workforce-optimization-management application—from its legacy on-premises data center to Google Cloud.

This move will help its global service centers optimize customer service activities for improved performance, by leveraging automation and AI-based analytics and insights to achieve better business outcomes..  

Currently, TELUS International has approximately 30,000 users on the Verint platform, so ensuring that it’s running on a reliable cloud platform like Google Cloud is vital.

Fast, painless migration

Martin Viljoen, VP of Information Technology at TELUS International, says the Verint migration from on-premise to Google Cloud was fast and seamless. “It took us about a week to stand up the infrastructure, which could have taken up to a year or more on-premises,” he says, given the traditional back and forth with hardware vendors to beef up the data center and solve problems along the way. “We didn’t have to worry about hardware availability on the fly. If you miss something, you just click and add it. You don't have to write up a purchase order and wait for six weeks for delivery,” with much more time needed to get the new hardware operational. 

In all, Viljoen says it took only 4–6 weeks to go from system design to production. “Everything we needed was readily available,” he says. “And at the end of the day, it was very successful.” 

Simple, quick provisioning

Every migration has its challenges, but TELUS International found this project’s ‘bumps in the road’ much easier to navigate in Google Cloud. For example, Viljoen says the company started with a load balancer which was inexpensive but didn’t provide all the functionality needed. “We just went down the menu and selected the F5 load balancer,” which the company is currently using on-premises. “It was a very simple, very quick provisioning process and it proved why we are in the cloud. You can just pick any service if or when needed.” He says doing the same thing with an off-the-shelf load balancer and running into the same issue would have delayed the project for months. . 

Getting F5 configured for the cloud was also easy. The company simply replicated its on-premises configuration in Google Cloud. 

One-click backup

Backing up into Google Cloud is also simple for TELUS International. “All you do is right-click,” says Viljoen. “On-premises, I would have to order oodles of bandwidth or buy a massive storage array. We're also backing up our on-premises data center into Google Cloud because it's so easy to do. It's a no-brainer.” 

Exceptional performance

With Verint Workforce Engagement and the Google Cloud Platform, TELUS has a world-class customer engagement platform to empower the remote and globally distributed workforce to support exceptional customer experiences, while gaining real-time insight into business operations for adjustment as needed to meet today’s ever-changing demands both within contact centers and throughout the enterprise.

TELUS International’s clients are benefiting from improved performance on Google Cloud. “On a server, antivirus software is running and it eats up half of your resources.” He says customers with resource-intensive jobs have reported dramatic improvements in speed, getting reports in minutes instead of hours. 

As a result of all these gains, TELUS International’s plan is to migrate more of Verint to Google Cloud, including key components of the application’s workforce management solution as well as its call and screen recording feature. Having this data in Google Cloud will make it more accessible and open up new possibilities for data analytics and integration with other services, such as the company’s telephony platform, which is also on Google Cloud. 

Viljoen says, “We're still at the low-hanging-fruit stage with Google Cloud, and we're going to get deeper into it in the platform. The next step is to integrate other services that either our company or our clients are mandating. We’re a growing and evolving global organization. Having incremental tools and  services in the cloud has made all aspects of our business a lot easier, including our integrations. Once things are in the cloud, it's just a lot simpler to enable our business.” 

At Google Cloud, we’re here to help you craft the right migration for you and your business just like we did with TELUS International. Get started by signing up for a free migration cost assessment, or visit our data center migration solutions page to learn more. Let’s get migrating.