In recent years, cruise vacations have become increasingly popular in Taiwan, with more and more people embracing the relaxing experience of a holiday where the vacation begins the moment you step aboard! But imagine this: you're excitedly preparing to call and book your dream cruise getaway, only to find that the cruise company's customer service lines are completely down due to a typhoon. Wouldn't that be incredibly frustrating?

For Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), a global industry leader with a 50-year history and a fleet of 14 dedicated cruise ships, this is a real challenge that directly impacts its business operations. Every year, its customer service centers handle as many as 4.8 million calls from travelers and travel agencies. As a pioneer in cruise industry innovation, NCL understands one thing very well: Without seamless customer service, there can be no perfect vacation.

▲ Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), a global industry leader with a fleet of 14 dedicated cruise ships, handles as many as 4.8 million calls from travelers and travel agencies at its customer service centers every year. (Source: Avaya)

The Challenge: A "Hurricane Crisis" at Its Miami Headquarters
Norwegian Cruise Line is headquartered in sunny Miami, Florida, where the climate, much like Taiwan's, is frequently challenged by extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes.

In the past, whenever a hurricane approached Florida, the entire office would descend into chaos for up to two weeks. The IT team had to scramble to coordinate emergency meetings and even arrange for employees to travel to different parts of the world just to ensure that incoming calls would still be answered. Barbara Tucker, NCL's Telecommunications Manager, recalled: "We used to rely heavily on our Miami office. If our phone system went down, there was very little we could do, and it was difficult to redirect incoming calls to other offices."

Whenever a hurricane approached Florida, NCL's telecommunications team faced up to two weeks of operational disruption, including large-scale global workforce relocation. Without a comprehensive backup system, employees based in Miami had to be urgently flown to locations around the world to ensure uninterrupted phone services. Another major challenge was inflexible call routing: NCL could not easily redirect calls to other offices and had to rely heavily on telecommunications carriers to manually change routing configurations on the backend. This process was not only time-consuming but also highly unpredictable.

 
The Solution: Avaya Creates a "Communications Safe Harbor"
To address these challenges, Norwegian Cruise Line partnered with communications expert Avaya to carry out a comprehensive system upgrade, transforming its communications infrastructure into a disaster-resilient solution:

• Rapid Deployment with Precision: In just six weeks, Avaya designed and deployed a customized architecture for NCL, featuring true off-site disaster recovery capabilities.
• Overnight Migration with Zero Disruption: To prepare for the upcoming peak travel season, the team successfully migrated as many as 1,300 customer service agents to the new system in a single night, with a remarkably smooth transition.
• Intelligent Call Distribution and Cloud-Based Communications: With the implementation of Avaya Call Center Elite, incoming calls could be intelligently automatically distributed across multiple customer service centers worldwide, while also providing flexible support for a large number of remote customer service agents.

Avaya's Comprehensive Customer Service Solutions
Avaya's solution for NCL went far beyond simply selling software. After thoroughly understanding NCL's existing communications infrastructure, Avaya proposed a comprehensive infrastructure upgrade. The key technologies implemented included:

• Avaya Call Center Elite: Provides powerful Intelligent Call Routing, call recording, and other advanced features. Combined with the system's extensive data analytics capabilities, it helps NCL management make more informed decisions regarding workforce allocation and employee training.
• Avaya Aura (Unified Global Communications Platform): Integrates customer service centers around the world and remote employees into a single standardized platform, serving as the core backbone of the company's communications infrastructure.
• Complete Migration to SIP Trunking: Avaya undertook a major transformation by replacing traditional PRI physical circuits at NCL's various locations with SIP trunking. This brought significant benefits: eliminating the need to maintain complicated hardware, cabling, and circuit equipment; improving the reliability of backup connectivity; and adopting a pay-for-what-you-need model that significantly optimized costs.
• Enterprise Survivable Servers: Dual-core systems and secondary disaster recovery servers were deployed in NCL's data centers, achieving true geographic redundancy. This ensures that even if one location experiences an outage, the global system can continue operating without interruption.
  
  

The Results: Smooth Sailing, Whatever the Weather
Since implementing Avaya's customer service center upgrade solution, NCL has experienced a completely different operational model. Today, Norwegian Cruise Line's customer service centers no longer have to worry about the weather!

Last fall, a minor hurricane once again approached Miami. Compared with the two weeks of chaos experienced in the past, Melissa Good, IT Network Director, explained: "Now, all we have to do is make sure the office doors and windows are secured, distribute satellite phones to key personnel, and then everyone can simply go home! This has been a tremendous change for us."

• Seamless Service Even During Hurricanes: Thanks to the new customer service infrastructure, with its comprehensive global backup capabilities and advanced call-routing mechanisms, whenever Miami experiences an outage, the system automatically and seamlessly redirects its heavy call volume to customer service centers in other regions, ensuring that no calls are missed.
• One-Click Global IT Management and Synchronization: Previously, NCL's offices around the world operated different system versions and configurations, making management fragmented and complicated. With a unified platform in place, the IT team now only needs to update a setting once, and the changes are automatically synchronized across all global offices, saving countless hours of maintenance work and labor costs.
• Migrating 1,300 Customer Service Agents Overnight: This major infrastructure transformation took only six weeks to design and deploy. Even more impressively, to meet the upcoming peak cruise season, NCL successfully migrated as many as 1,300 customer service agents to the Avaya system in just one night, without causing any service interruptions.
• Achieving 24/7 "Follow-the-Sun" Customer Service: Through automated call routing and a unified global platform, NCL is gradually realizing its ultimate business vision of "Follow-the-Sun" operations. The goal is to ensure that whenever customers feel like booking a cruise, whether late at night or early in the morning and regardless of their time zone, a live customer service representative is always available to answer their calls promptly. This significantly reduces friction in the booking process and successfully transforms the customer service center into a powerful 24/7 revenue-generating engine.

The next time you enjoy the sea breeze on the deck with a cocktail in hand, remember that behind the scenes, powerful technology partners like Avaya are working quietly and reliably to keep everything running smoothly, allowing Norwegian Cruise Line to focus all its energy on creating the perfect vacation at sea for you!

About Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL): Norwegian Cruise Line is an innovator in the cruise travel industry, with a 50-year history of continuously pushing the boundaries of traditional cruising. Notably, NCL has revolutionized the cruise industry by giving guests the freedom and flexibility to create their ideal cruise vacations according to their own schedules and preferences. Today, Norwegian Cruise Line invites guests to "Feel Free" and explore the world aboard its fleet of 14 ships, specially designed for global travel, offering relaxed and enjoyable cruise experiences on some of the newest and most modern vessels. Recently, NCL received several honors at the World Travel Awards, including "Europe's Leading Cruise Line" for the ninth consecutive year, "Caribbean's Leading Cruise Line" for the third time, and "World's Leading Large Ship Cruise Line" for the fifth consecutive year.

About Avaya: Avaya is a global leader in digital communications solutions, dedicated to helping businesses and government organizations deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences. With more than 25 years of experience serving the Taiwan market, Avaya continues to provide value-added services across its UC, CC, and SME product lines, tailored to different market needs. These services include voice communications, innovative digital transformation, and integrated ICT applications. With the support of its professional partner network, Avaya helps more enterprises accelerate digital transformation, integrate information and communications technologies, and build more seamless and customer-friendly experiences.

Sources: 跟著郵輪度假去！他們的客服如何「面對暴風雨」？ | 實語股份有限公司 TrueStatement Co., Ltd. / Smooth Sailing at Norwegian Cruise Line with Geo-Redundant Contact Center | Avaya Customer Stories