Addison Lee offers a total ‘one stop shop’ transport solution, from a private car service to a single courier bike. The London-based courier business has more than 1,500 passenger cars, along with vans and bikes, in its fleet and handles around 45,000 transactions a week. Addison Lee prides itself on its high level of service and guarantees that its booking agents will answer every customer call within five seconds.

The Challenge: Flexible Access to Enable Home Working

Addison Lee wanted to execute a remote access strategy to enable home working. The reasons were twofold. The company was growing rapidly but its call centre building could not comfortably accommodate its 80 booking agents. Secondly, to enable staffing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Addison Lee provided transport for its employees to the call centre.

The company needed a longer-term and more affordable solution. By allowing its employees to work from home, Addison Lee could avoid the costs of setting up a new call centre, reduce transport expenses, improve working conditions and increase employee retention.

Peter Ingram, IT Director, Addison Lee, said, “If we didn’t address the situation and we continued to expand, then we would have been faced with health and safety issues. We either had to move our call centre into a larger building, which would have incurred additional costs, or we had to create the flexibility to allow our employees to work from home.”

Citrix Access Platform for a Virtual Call Centre

In 2005, the courier company engaged Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor Teksys to build a flexible, secure and scalable solution that would enable remote access to applications. Teksys implemented Citrix Presentation Server™ Enterprise Edition, part of the Citrix Access Suite™, onto four HP Proliant DL360 servers built with Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003. Filtered ADSL network connection lines were installed to the homes of Addison Lee’s employees. Addison Lee supplied its employees with all the required hardware, including PCs running the Microsoft Windows® XP Embedded operating system.

The home users access courier industry-specific applications hosted on the Citrix Presentation Server at Addison Lee’s headquarters, such as Realtime Operational Control System (ROCS 2), Symposium Real-Time Display, Road Base fleet management system and Key Radio map client 2004.

The solution included deployment of two Citrix Access Gateway™ secure socket layer virtual private network (SSL VPN) appliances to encrypt data travelling over the Internet. Nortel i2050 IP SoftPhone, a call management solution, distributes each incoming call automatically through the courier company’s private branch exchange (PBX) via Citrix Access Gateway to the first available operator. The result is quick and seamless delivery of calls.

Cost Savings in Hardware and Infrastructure

The Citrix solution helped Addison Lee to avoid the high cost of establishing a new physical call centre, and allowed the company to utilise its existing PCs for remote access rather than invest in new devices. To date, the new infrastructure has been rolled out to 50 home users via legacy PCs.

Ingram said, “We calculated the overhead costs per desk of setting up a booking agent within a building compared to the cost per home worker after establishing remote access, and we have saved approximately £2,500 per desk, per year.”

Business Continuity for Uninterrupted Customer Service

The two Citrix Access Gateway appliances were designed as a failover system so that when one server is live, the other is on standby. In the event of the primary server shutting down, the failover operation automatically switches to the standby server without human intervention. In this way, Addison Lee is assured of continuous business operations.

Secure Access for All Workers

The Citrix solution is designed with security managed at the server level, eliminating the multiple points of vulnerability created by remote desktop PCs. Because application processing remains on the server, no secure data, such as personal customer details, leaves the data centre. The minimal amount of data, such as screen updates, that travels over the Citrix Access Gateway network is encrypted. The Citrix infrastructure also supports the use of RSA SecureID two-factor authentication. In order to gain access to the system, remote workers at Addison Lee require a user name and password, a pin code, and an RSA security token. The RSA token has a six digit ID number that changes every 60 seconds so if it is stolen it cannot be used, thus maximising security.

Citrix Enables Consistent Customer Service and Flexible Working

The Citrix Access Suite has provided flexibility and agility, improving the conditions for Addison Lee’s agents. Employees no longer need to commute to the call centre building in the early hours of the morning. Today, 25 of the 80 booking agents have opted to work from home. As a result, Addison Lee has been able to retain its highly trained staff.

Ingram said: “Our staff can choose to continue to work at home with no costs to themselves. All the booking agents need to do is provide some space for the equipment. Thus, many of our highly trained employees are opting to work from home.

“We are able to retain our skilled booking agents, so we can provide a consistent level of service to our customers and avoid the costs of hiring and training new staff. Citrix improved our agility. For our business, which prides itself on providing excellent service, this was vitally important.”

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