Case Study: Plantronics achieves smarter, multimodal customer service and near‑zero agent attrition with Avaya

Plantronics Ramps Up Smarter Customer Service

Plantronics, a Santa Cruz–based leader in headsets and unified communications, faced rapidly rising and more complex customer interactions as users moved to self‑service, social and mobile channels. The company was handling about 750,000 voice calls a year plus millions of Knowledge Base visits, and needed to integrate voice, email, chat and SMS, distribute load across global centers, speed up service and improve agent engagement and retention.

To address this, Plantronics launched a “Smarter Working” program with Avaya — enabling work‑from‑home with softphone technology, giving agents ownership of calls, providing intensive ongoing training (~10 hours/week), and deploying integrated multimodal systems and flexible workspaces. The initiative cut attrition from 5–15% to nearly zero (about $400,000 annual cost avoidance), consistently exceeded KPIs (16s average speed to answer, FCR above target ranges) and boosted customer satisfaction to 83–87%, while repositioning the contact center toward revenue generation and planning a fully distributed global model.

Plantronics

Ken Kannappan

Chief Executive Officer