Case Study / NORWEGIAN

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Smooth Sailing At
Norwegian Cruise Line
With Geo-RedundantContact Center
Norwegian Cruise Line Now Fully Weather-ReadyHurricanes and other extreme weather can be a major disruption tooperations at Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL)—in more ways than you
would expect. Interruptions to the company’s contact center, which takes
approximately 4.8 million calls every year from guests and travel agents,
can seriously impact customer service and revenue.

www.ncl.com“We live and die by the call center,” says Barbara Tucker, Manager,Telecommunications at NCL. “Customers have to be able to reach us tobook cruises.”That’s why NCL made a critical move recently, in shifting its contact
center operations from its Miami headquarters, where they werecentralized. Housed in a glass building near the Miami coast, the office
was particularly vulnerable to weather. When a hurricane headed its way,
the staff spent days planning and preparing, and hours re-routing calls
and people to other locations.
“Before, if a hurricane was coming toward Florida, it was two weeks ofchaos, with us sending people to other parts of the world,” Tucker says.
“We had a deep dependency on this office with no resilience if we lostthe phone system. We had no easy way to transfer calls from Miami toother offices.”1

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Case Study / NORWEGIAN

Challenge• NCL’s Miami contact
center was vulnerable
to weather-related
disruptions• Preparing for aweather event took
weeks and dozens ofmeetings, and requiredthat NCL fly teammembers to otherlocations• The IT team could noteasily re-route calls toother offices“Unique in the Industry”
Today, NCL has a redundant, resilient contact center infrastructure that’s
no longer dependent on the Miami office. Calls are now distributed acrossmultiple contact centers and among a large population of home-based
agents—and changeable on the fly.
For the platform and architecture behind it, NCL turned to Avaya. “Avaya
brought a depth of knowledge about contact center operations that wasessential to restructuring our call center infrastructure,” Tucker says. “Wefound Avaya’s understanding of telephony and contact center operations
to be unique in the industry.”
NCL deployed Avaya Call Center Elite for intelligent call routing andservice-enhancing capabilities such as call recording. Through integrated
Avaya solutions, NCL gains rich analytics on which to make decisions
regarding staffing, training and more.
The Avaya team worked closely with the cruise line to design theinfrastructure to optimize redundancy. NCL data centers have dual coreand secondary disaster recovery enterprise survivable servers, providing
true geo-redundancy. Avaya also replaced all PRI circuits with SIP
trunking at each location, for more reliable service through redundancy;
no hardware, wiring or circuit boxes to maintain; and the ability to pay for
only the lines needed.
“Avaya did a lot of really thoughtful things in designing ourinfrastructure,” says Melissa Good, Director of Network, Telecom andEnterprise Support. “They built in geo-redundancy of the circuits,
carefully planned where they will terminate, what would be on eachcircuit, and how circuits will failover with SIP. Through testing we knowthat the failover and redundancy really works.”© 2019 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Case Study / NORWEGIAN

Value Created• NCL and Avaya
planned and deployeda geo-redundant
infrastructure in six
weeks, and moved over
1300 agents to Avaya
overnight• Traffic re-routes
automatically throughother contact centerlocations• The IT team saves
time by making
configuration changes
once for all locations“It was important
to go live by aspecific datebecause we wereapproaching ourbusy season. Any
delays would
have required us
to push it to thefollowing year.
Fortunately, theconversion wasreally smoothand quick.”

Designing and implementing the new infrastructure took just six weeks.
And when it came time for the cutover, careful preparation paid off; NCL
moved over 1,300 agents to Avaya overnight.
“It was important to go live by a specific date because we were approaching
our busy season,” says Alex Garcia, Manager, Call Center Staffing, Passenger
Services. “Any delays would have required us to push it to the following year.
Fortunately, the conversion was really smooth and quick.”

Peace of Mind: Automatic Re-routing
Now, NCL is no longer dependent on the Miami location. In the event of aweather emergency, the contact center and associated communications
remain running, with traffic re-routing automatically through othercontact center locations.
That difference became clear last fall when a low-category hurricane washeaded its way. The IT team knew that, if the Miami office shut down, thecontact center could continue as usual.
“Before, preparing for a hurricane meant we had to re-route calls throughthe carrier,” Good says. “Now, we just make sure everything is secured
here, hand out satellite phones and go home. That’s huge for us.”With the move to Avaya, NCL also simplifies changes. “Instead of every
office having their own rules and regulations, everybody is on the same
platform and same version,” Good says. “When we make global changes,
we make them in one place and we’re done.”
NCL is moving at a steady pace to shift its contact centers globally toa single corporate standard. As a single global platform for business
communications, Avaya Aura moves NCL towards its strategic businessvision of a ‘follow-the-sun’ customer engagement model – with the goalof allowing customers to reach a live sales agent at any time of the day.
“Our aim is to be better positioned to serve the customer when thecustomer calls, whatever time of day that may be,” explains Good. “Wewant to reduce friction to closing sales.”Migrating overseas locations to Avaya has gone as smoothly as the first
cutover—overnight, with no interruption to service.
From planning to ongoing support, NCL has found a knowledgeable,reliable partner in Avaya. “Avaya took the time to get to know oursystems and architected a really solid design for us,” Tucker says. “Now,we can count on Avaya engineers to be there anytime weneed something.”—Alex Garcia, Manager, Call
Center Staffing, Passenger
Services© 2019 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Case Study / NORWEGIAN“Before, preparing for a hurricane meant we had tore-route calls through the carrier. Now, we just make sureeverything is secured here, hand out satellite phones andgo home. That’s huge for us.
—Melissa Good, Director of Network, Telecom and Enterprise Support”

Solutions• Avaya Call Center Elite• Avaya Communication
Manager• Avaya UnifiedCommunications• Avaya Session Manager• Avaya System Manager• Avaya Messaging G450
Branch Gateways• Avaya Session Border
Controller for Enterprise• Avaya Call ManagementSystem• Avaya Application
Enablement Services

About Norwegian Cruise Line
Norwegian Cruise Line is the innovator in cruise travel with a 50-year
history of breaking the boundaries of traditional cruising. Most notably,
Norwegian revolutionized the cruise industry by offering guests the freedom
and flexibility to design their ideal cruise vacation on their schedule. Today,
Norwegian invites guests to “Feel Free” to explore the world on one of 14purpose-built ships, providing guests the opportunity to enjoy a relaxed,
resort style cruise vacation on some of the newest and most contemporary
ships at sea. Recently, the line was named “Europe’s Leading Cruise Line”
for the ninth consecutive year, as well as “Caribbean’s Leading Cruise Line”
for the third time and “World’s Leading Large Ship Cruise Line” for the fifth
straight year by the World Travel Awards.

About Avaya
Businesses are built on the experiences they provide and every day
millions of those experiences are built by Avaya (NYSE:AVYA). For overone hundred years, we’ve enabled organizations around the globe towin—by creating intelligent communications experiences for customers
and employees. Avaya builds open, converged and innovative solutions
to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration—in the cloud,on premise, or a hybrid of both. To grow your business, we’re committed
to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. We’rethe technology company you trust to help you deliver Experiences thatMatter. Visit us at www.avaya.com.

© 2019 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved. Avaya and the Avaya logo are trademarks of Avaya Inc. and areregistered in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks identified by ®, TM, or SM
are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc.
08/19 • CC7962EN-01

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