CASE STUDY: UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

COMPANY: Mattersight

FOUNDED: 1994

EMPLOYEES: 230

LOCATIONS: Chicago (headquarters); Austin, Texas; and Edina, Minn.

I.T. STAFF: 8

ANNUAL REVENUE: $33.5 million

BUSINESS: Mattersight provides enterprise analytics with a focus on customer and employee interactions and behaviors. Mattersight Behavioral Analytics uses customer and employee interactions, employee desktop data and other contextual information to route callers, enhance operational performance and predict customer and employee outcomes.

At a Glance

A BETTER WAY TO CONNECT

A move to Microsoft Lync provides analytics company Mattersight with significant cost savings, streamlined management and enhanced collaboration.

Mattersight CIO Jeff Geltz says opting for Microsoft Lync saved the company close to a half-million dollars.

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2 CASE STUDY: UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

The Challenges of IntegrationMicrosoft Lync lets employees at Mattersight’s three

locations collaborate more effectively.

But Kevin Mattakat, a senior network engineer at

Mattersight, says Lync offers some new features to

be aware of. For example, Mattakat says, when the

company operated its communications system on Cisco

Systems hardware, it had a much clearer definition of

the responsibilities of the network engineers, systems

administrators and database architects.

“In the Cisco world, I controlled the network and could

schedule when I did the patches,” he says. “But with

Microsoft Lync, everything is integrated, and it’s more of an

Active Directory environment, which is a big change for a

networking person like me.”

Mattakat advises any IT department looking to deploy Lync

to hold a meeting across the different teams so rules and

custom privileges can be assigned before the organization

goes live with Lync.

He says CDW was especially helpful during the pilot phase,

working with Mattersight’s IT staff to come up with an

initial plan. He also says it’s really important to get database

administrators involved early on because they are the most

in tune with the Active Directory environment.

“Lync gets people out of their stovepipes,” he says. “The

same thing happened years ago when voice and data

converged and became packetized. I didn’t come from a

voice background, so it wasn’t a major adjustment. Now

Microsoft Lync takes communications another step further

where it combines voice, data, video and features like

presence.”

The best tech companies don’t just sell and market the

latest technology; they also use it.

That’s the case at Mattersight, a Chicago-based

behavioral analytics company that in early 2013

transitioned to Microsoft Lync for unified communications.

CIO Jeff Geltz says the decision to go with Lync was

based on economics, the tremendous collaboration

benefits Lync offers and sheer timing.

“We knew that the lease was ending on our unified

communications equipment in March 2013, so the decision

before us was to replace those components or go with

something different,” Geltz explains. “We even looked at

some open-source solutions for a while, but saw that the

capabilities of Lync far exceeded anything that was out

there on the market, especially for the price.”

Geltz says replacing the company’s old gear would have

required an investment well into the six figures. Instead,

for one-third the cost (or roughly $80,000), the company

switched to Lync.

Geltz says that at first he was skeptical that the company

could achieve such dramatic cost savings with Lync. To

clarify matters, he contacted CDW and asked them to send

over a systems architect.

“We needed a sanity check and help plotting a strategy,

which is what CDW did for us,” Geltz says, adding that

Mattersight has been a partner with CDW since 2000.

“Remember that we’re a tech company, so we asked a

lot of pointed questions about the type of servers we’d

need, telephony, the migration and redundancy. The CDW

rep covered all the bases and was very supportive. He was

always able to answer our questions and never said ‘I’ll get

back to you.’ My guys were very impressed.”

CDW Technical Specialist Andrew Hunkins says the

Mattersight team was very knowledgeable and had high

expectations.

“It was great that we could show them that level

of expertise,” Hunkins says. “They are a consulting

organization, so being able to collaborate and escalate calls

to a video session is critical to their business.”

Most of the savings Mattersight has seen are from reduced

licensing costs. In addition, Lync can be set up on IBM servers

that are far less expensive than other UC systems.

“It wasn’t just the upfront cost; it also gets very expensive

to pay for the ongoing operating costs of maintaining an

extensive rack of gear,” he says. “We would have had to buy a

significant amount of hardware and wound up saving close to

a half-million dollars going with Lync.”

Deploying Lync also let Mattersight end its use of $400

telephones and move entirely to softphones. Employees

now receive and make phone calls on their notebook

computers using $100 Bluetooth USB headsets from

Plantronics.

“We gave some hard phones to some of the executives,

but we also set them up with the softphones, and in every

case, they gave the hard phone back to us,” says Geltz.

“People found that they liked the headphones.”

Feature-Rich LyncCost savings are important, but what really sold Geltz and

crew on Microsoft Lync was the way the technology lets

employees — in locations as disparate as the company’s

Chicago headquarters, its data center in Edina, Minn., and its

development location in Austin, Texas — work collaboratively.

Geltz says increased interactivity among staff members

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3

Improving Employee-Customer InteractionsWhen a customer contacts a company, the connection that results —

whether it’s positive or not — affects business outcomes.

Mattersight’s Predictive Behavioral Routing technology identifies the

optimal customer-employee pairing for each contact center interaction,

based on communication styles, personality and other behavioral

characteristics. This information is then used by the existing routing

architecture to match each customer with the best available employee,

increasing the likelihood of a positive connection.

Companies can immediately improve important metrics — cost reductions,

improved sales, reduced attrition, improvements in first contact resolution

and increases in customer satisfaction — by 10 to 50 percent.

Mattersight’s solutions are delivered in a software-as-a-service model

and integrate with industry-standard telephony and routing systems.

More information is available at mattersight.com.

800.800.4239 | CDW.com

made a big difference. With the presence function of Lync,

employees always know if someone is available, even a

worker in a remote office. And each employee has a picture

associated with all communications.

Greg Marciciak, Mattersight’s service desk manager, says

employees can now attach files through the chat feature

in Lync, which means the company no longer ties up its

email system for its communications. And unlike email,

where attachments are often limited to 2 or 3 megabytes,

employees can send a file of any size via chat. Lync also has

video apps, as well as a feature that turns speech into text.

“People can set up chats in a matter of seconds, and

because Lync integrates with Microsoft Exchange, they can

easily drag people into a conference call from the address book.

It’s now much easier to set up a quick call,” Marciciak says.

“And from a support perspective,” he adds, “it’s made my

life easier because I can take over an employee’s desktop and

troubleshoot a problem. I never had that capability before. I

can also work remotely much more easily, which is nice.”

Kevin Mattakat, a senior network engineer, also has high

praise for Lync.

“I can IM my support engineers in a couple of clicks,” he

says. “The functionality is awesome, and it improves our

productivity.”

Lync also boosts network awareness, Mattakat says,

noting that the service’s real-time monitoring delivers

information on the audio quality of each call.

Before Lync, the IT staff had to manage a separate

server for the voicemail-in-email feature. Now, all of that

is integrated within Lync. Meetings and webinars can be

set up in Lync without the need for separate user names,

passwords and special plug-ins.

In fact, CDW integrated many of the features

Mattersight used with its previous UC system into the Lync

environment.

Jeremy Silber, a senior Microsoft consultant at CDW,

says among the features Mattersight wanted integrated

into the Lync environment were high availability (in case

of outages), integration with Microsoft Office applications

(for presence information) and mobile access to Lync via

notebooks and cellphones. “The mobility piece for remote

users was huge for Mattersight,” Silber says.

“Many of the employees often ask me why the company

didn’t deploy Lync sooner,” Mattakat adds.

Scott Cotter, Mattersight’s vice president of marketing,

agrees. “There’s no question that Lync makes the staff

more efficient,” he says. “It lets us share information and

collaborate more easily. The video feature is also a big help.

Our vice president of channels, responsible for nurturing

“We needed a sanity check and help plotting a strategy, which is what CDW did for us.” — Jeff Geltz, CIO, Mattersight

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CASE STUDY: UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

Microsoft Lync’s capability to let employees in different locations work collaboratively is one of its most compelling features, CIO Jeff Geltz says.

relationships with our partners, uses the video feature. He

feels it is important for keeping the teams connected.”

An Orchestrated RolloutMattersight employed a clear strategy when it rolled

out Lync. The first thing the company did was pilot the

technology late in 2012 with some of its power users.

Once they were up to speed, Molly Joyce, the client lead

on the company’s training and adoption team, set up a

series of more than 10 training sessions to get the general

staff acclimated with Lync.

Joyce says that the company couldn’t just give users a

headset and let them go. The trainers started by explaining

to the staff that Lync was integrating three main systems:

meeting setups, instant messaging and telephones.

“At first, not having a desk phone was hard for people to

figure out, but when we explained it to them and they got

a chance to use the headsets, they realized that they are

really very simple,” she says.

After the basic introduction, Joyce explained how

instant messaging works within Lync. She showed users

how, in a matter of seconds, they could collaborate via IM,

set up groups and meetings, share documents or use a

whiteboard — all within the system’s chat function.

“What we tried to do was show the immediate benefit

to the users,” she says. “People understood that it was

much easier to use just one system. In the past, we had

people working in Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail. Lync

consolidates all those systems, so everyone works from

the same system and can easily find one another.”

Joyce says one factor that helped with the rollout was

that nearly 90 percent of the staff received new Lenovo

notebooks (either T530 or X230 models) with Microsoft

Lync installed. Setup time was minimal, she says, and the

training staff was able to focus on familiarizing users with

the basic features and benefits of the system.

“People didn’t have to give up their computers to the

IT department for half a day for an install,” she says. “We

could get right into the training and cover a lot of ground

inside of an hour.”

During the training, Joyce says, users were required to

move their existing meetings from the old system to Lync.

Although somewhat cumbersome, it forced everyone to

get hands-on experience using the new technology.

“It really helped that we’re a tech company,” Joyce says.

“Many of the people on the staff are young and are very

receptive to using new technology. It’s why they came

to work for Mattersight in the first place. For some of

our people who have used the old system for a long time

or those who had a hard time making the transition to a

softphone, we set up one-on-one sessions. But most

everyone adjusted to the technology very naturally.”

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