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Resolve technical support inquiries, handle more calls, and deliver superior customer satisfaction with WorldSmart Call Center solution.

"Our customers can now get technical questions answered in real-time without delay. Most of the time, customers’ issues get resolved through one call. Our agents are now handling thousands of calls per month. We are extremely impressed with the ease of use of the PanTerra Call Center services and tools that allow us to achieve 100% turnaround."

Mike Moniz, Sr. Network Administrator, BIOLASE Technology, Inc.

Background

BIOLASE Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLTI) is the leading dental laser company that develops, manufactures, and markets lasers and related products that advance the practice of dentistry and medicine world-wide. Their products incorporate patented technologies that provide clinically superior performance with less pain and faster recovery times. With its headquarters in Irvine, CA, and offices in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Spain, BIOLASE currently has a global installed base of 6,500 customers in over 40 countries. These dentists, oral surgeons, other specialists and clinics require superior technical support in order to provide consistent, comfortable and safe treatment to their patients. BIOLASE field service engineers and the technical support help desk have the critical mission to respond to customer inquiries and resolve their technical issues quickly and accurately.

Challenge

While there are many hardware and software solutions available to help technical support center executives manage call center operations, very few of them address all the key criteria that BIOLASE was looking for – flexibility, affordability, scalability, simplicity and mobility. Since their existing communications service provider could not meet their needs, a new call center solution was necessary to more efficiently route and monitor customer technical queries while providing the best possible customer experience. This need arose because of the increasing popularity of BIOLASE products and services in the domestic market, along with its plans to focus on international markets and strengthening its global organization for stable growth and performance in the future.

The company had a short window to select, customize and implement a call center solution that would handle all the technical support calls from the dentists and clinics using their products. Having looked at some on-premise solutions, BIOLASE did not see the right match to their criteria in terms of feature-set and functionality. The upfront capital investment and maintenance costs were also prohibitively expensive. When BIOLASE evaluated the PanTerra WorldSmart Call Center solution in early 2008, the company found the right fit and was impressed with the flexible capabilities that PanTerra had to offer.

"We had a cumbersome manual process before." said Mike Moniz, Sr. Networks Administrator. "When our customers had technical issues, they usually would call our headquarters office in Irvine. They would have to leave a message and a field service engineer later get back to them. Normal turnaround to resolve customers’ issues would be from a few days to weeks. Deploying an advanced call center solution that met our criteria was absolutely necessary."

Solution

BIOLASE found that the PanTerra WorldSmart Call Center had all the features needed to run a call center business, while still maintaining seamless integration with other cloud-based applications such as communications and messaging through a unified user experience. This enables agents to collaborate to fix customers’ issues much faster. BIOLASE found that it could provide unparalleled technical support without investing in the complex array of hardware, software and multi-vendor components traditionally required to build a call center. Equally important was the ease of setup for the hosted solution and the web remote control and configuration tools that have the flexibility to make changes easily. Finally, PanTerra’s “pay as you go” model eliminated the upfront costs and better matched the company’s operations.

BIOLASE initially implemented a hosted, interactive, virtual technical support center with 24 customer agents distributed across North America. The WorldSmart Call Center consisted of a wide array of applications that tied together all real-time communications functions - from phone, instant messaging, voicemail, ACD live monitoring, advanced call queuing, call recording, live chat support, real-time activity reporting - all seamlessly integrated. Because the service is completely cloud-based, the BIOLASE field service engineers were able to achieve superior performance from their remote offices at any location in any time zone.

PanTerra delivered this robust functionality on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis with no requirement for hardware and software capital expenses. So instead of committing $1 million+ upfront to purchase an on-premise system and having to hire additional IT personnel to implement and maintain it, BIOLASE was able to set up and deploy their new call center within days. They were able to immediately establish an efficient and effective support operation, as well as achieve significant cost-savings that will increase over time, while gaining the added value of improved service and higher satisfaction for their growing customer base.

"PanTerra services are very easy to manage. I really like the web-based administration dashboard, which makes remote configuration and control so simple and intuitive." says Mr. Moniz, "You can get on to the Internet anywhere on the planet to modify your settings, such as hunt groups and call routing plans to accommodate changing business needs. This flexibility has saved us big time. I know how difficult it is with a traditional on-premise system when it comes to change configurations, which usually takes days to weeks, not to mention the labor and costs involved. I can now get changes done in a couple of hours in the office or even in my car with PanTerra - how cool is that?"

"The savings in time, resources, and money we experienced with the WorldSmart Call Center were immediate and dramatic.” Mr. Moniz continues “But equally important improvements, such as the superior responsiveness to our customers that we can provide, and resolving almost all inquiries from our customers in a single call, have also been made possible. Our customer satisfaction has soared with the PanTerra solution."

The WorldSmart Call Center was also chosen because of the flexibility and scalability of the platform. As a hosted solution, the entire system can be upgraded for higher volumes at a moment’s notice. The unlimited usage plan also allows budgeting call center costs in a more predictable way with no surprises. BIOLASE is now working with PanTerra to expand the call center operation for their global sales team and enhance the existing headquarters office internal communications and collaboration.

"I am completely in favor of the soft-phone integrated with the instant messaging client. It is so simple with great mobility support." Mr. Moniz continues. "The soft-phone is a full function office phone with multiple lines, transfer, and conference features. You can download the client software to any PC and use it anywhere. This gives us great flexibility especially when our field service engineers are working at their home offices or on the road. I have never seen any other solution that provides such capabilities to mobilize these services."

Key Results and Benefits

• Improved customer satisfaction with high “one call” resolution of technical support issues.
• Increased productivity with live call monitoring (silent, whisper, barge-in) that allows call center supervisors the ability to more effectively train their virtual agents from anywhere at any time.
• Unparalleled adaptability by remotely controlling and configuring hunt groups and call routing plans at any time to allow calls to be routed to the most available and appropriate agent.
• Simplified and streamlined internal communications via instant messaging to facilitate knowledge and information sharing and achieve faster technical resolutions.
• Enable a "virtual" call center workforce and staffing from multiple remote locations seamlessly and reliably.
• Visibility into call patterns, volumes, client needs and service levels with real-time call center activity reporting.
• Flexible cloud-based service with no hardware or software investment, scaling up or down based on demand, and predictable per seat pricing.

About Biolase Technology

BIOLASE Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLTI) develops, manufactures and markets lasers and related products that advance the practice of dentistry and medicine. The company’s principal products are dental laser systems that perform a broad range of dental procedures, including cosmetic and complex surgical applications. Headquartered in Irvine, California, the company has sales offices around the world.

About PanTerra Networks

PanTerra Networks, Inc. is a leading provider of cloud-based unified communications with its WorldSmart™ software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The company is privately held with its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and Research and Development located in Hyderabad, India. For more information, please visit www.panterranetworks.com or call +1 408.702.2200.