Vehicle retail giant works with Citrix HDX Plus for Windows 365 to keep the wheels of service turning

Prioritizing the experience of staff and customers

For their Endpoint and Mobility Engineering Manager, ensuring a secure, reliable and seamless experience for every call center agent is mission-critical. His team must safeguard data across a fragmented device landscape, prevent performance issues that could lead to lost sales, and reduce security gaps that pose exposure risks. At the same time, they must support hybrid flexibility without retraining staff and avoid the downtime that comes from slow endpoint triage. Their goal: empower agents to deliver exceptional customer service without being hindered by the technology they rely on every day. 

“These folks are the front line of our customer experience,” explains the Manager. “Like a lot of businesses, we’re introducing things like agentic AI, but the call center is really there to enhance that experience and pick up the more challenging questions or concerns that come from the customer base.”  

Missing any of his key objectives carries considerable business risk for the Manager. Gaps in security could lead to exposed data, lack of endpoint management could lead to service downtime for the call center, and fragmented toolsets could boost operating costs. Most critically of all, a poor environment for agents could compromise the company’s reputation and even cost the business sales.

Microsoft and Citrix: working together to deliver a powerful end-to-end solution

Managing these priorities is something that the customer has already entrusted to Citrix for many years, and the relationship is constantly growing and evolving. 

“We’ve continued to partner with Citrix because of the flexibility its solutions offer,” says the Manager. “It provides software-centric user experiences with the right security posture, the right access, at the right time, and for the right price point."

Their call center hybrid work environment combines remote access with a mixture of classic on-premise server and cloud-based applications. And its choice of Citrix DaaS, both on-premises and in the cloud to create the flexibility, scalability, and operational efficiency it needs to keep call center staff working productively and effectively makes perfect sense.

“By driving a comprehensive, curated user experience for the call center through Citrix DaaS and the policies surrounding them, we’ve seen an increase of more than 20% in associates’ readiness to support our customers, and a 50% reduction in troubleshooting time”.

It also simplifies endpoint supply and management for a diverse and distributed user base, while providing a consistent and secure user experience that has the power to flex to changing requirements.

“The hybrid nature of our environment is probably the main reason why we use Citrix, because it allows us to literally choose anything in terms of tools and applications,” the Manager explains. “It also makes it easier to transition and flex into the cloud and back without having to retrain an entire set of people. It’s an excellent experience.”

Complementing this experience is Citrix HDX Plus for Windows 365, which delivers enhanced Citrix HDX functionalities to their Windows environment, recently expanding this to include provisioned machines in India. It gives the customer's 750 end users the full Windows 365 experience and application suite without compromising on Citrix’s administration and security support. It also boosts the consistency of end-user support, increases options for self-service, and simplifies hardware procurement. For the business, it’s vital to the effective management of its estate. 

“Citrix integrates directly with Microsoft, so we get to use all the tools. It just made so much sense to attach the Citrix processes onto Windows 365, and ramping it up for new use cases has been a breeze. We’ve nearly doubled our total VDI use case since first trying it out.”

A single point of reference for device insights  

Adding further strength to the device management strategy is Citrix Experience Insights, which gives the team a powerful set of insights into how all these devices are functioning and the experiences of those using them. 

For the customer, it’s a true game changer. Instead of switching between a variety of tools that collectively offered little visibility into their estate, he now has a single point of reference with a comprehensive range of insights.  

“We’ve had nothing like this before. We would just look into environmental conditions on an ad hoc basis,” the Manager notes. “With Citrix Experience Insights we have a full end-to-end capability to understand the performance, the constraints, and the connectivity of any given user group. It’s core to our business.” 

It’s also allowing the team to proactively identify potential problems and tackle them before they have chance do any real damage, significantly reducing the need for oversight and escalation. In a customer-centric environment such as the call center, this represents an important competitive advantage. 

“Right out the box, our team can proactively reach out to end users and say hey, it looks like you’re starting to have some issues. We then send a replacement device, or for people who are close to a business location or otherwise, we can triage on site. The environmental consistency that Citrix delivers has significantly improved the total time to resolution and reduced the need to send an engineer to every incident.”

Flexible and secure workplace management

The combination of flexibility, security, and ease of management enabled by Citrix means the work environment it needs can be delivered to the people who need it. As an engineer and manager, they value the controls and freedoms that Citrix delivers from a solutioning perspective, while also highlighting its security capabilities. 

“If our cybersecurity team is leaning in on us to solve data loss prevention conditions or challenges, we know that’s something Citrix is constantly working on. There’s a great pace of ingenuity coming from Citrix that’s continuing to allow us to be flexible. “And it’s solving challenges that we didn’t know we had.” 

And looking beyond the call center to the development and quality assurance teams, some of which include offshore personnel and unmanaged devices, the power of Citrix solutions is already clear to the Manager. 

“For some of the offshore folks we can more dynamically disable screenshotting, for example, or enable watermarking for certain applications or sessions,” he explains. “Citrix’s ability to allow us to control things like that is invaluable.”  

And the journey for the retailer continues. As the Citrix user base expands,  the customer is also looking at implementing Citrix SecurAccess with Chrome Enterprise and taking HDX further across its organization, including some offshore operations. It’s an increasingly important part of a comprehensive IT strategy – one that allows them to support their people, giving them the power, flexibility, and capability to focus on outstanding service delivery. It’s why this customer continues to lead the way in an increasingly competitive and disrupted market.