When a new platform goes live and breaks the customer experience, the fallout lands fast: billing errors, angry callers, spiraling wait times, and service levels that collapse overnight. 

This is the story of a state toll road organization that lived through exactly that scenario with its back-office system migration. TTEC helped absorb the shock, stabilize operations, and turn the situation into a model the client has since scaled to new territories.  

The problem 

The organization manages a network of state toll roads and had recently expanded operations into an additional tolling region. In October 2023, the agency migrated from its existing back-office system to a new platform to manage customer inquiries, inventory, payments, and other customer relationship functions.  

Despite approximately 10 months of testing before implementation, the migration created significant post-launch issues. The result was approximately four months of exceptionally high customer contact volumes. Call volume quadrupled during the disruption. Customers faced incorrect bills, double charges, confusion about the new billing experience, increased refund requests, exceptionally long call queues and wait times, and a substantial increase in email volume. Service levels and abandonment performance deteriorated significantly. 

Service levels fell to 33.47%, call abandonment reached 4.8%, and refund processing service levels dropped to 20.4% in a matter of weeks. 

TTEC was uniquely positioned to help because of its existing, deeply integrated relationship with the client. TTEC already provided end-to-end support across customer service, training, workforce management, and on-site operations with roughly 250 employees across functions. This gave the team direct visibility into both the customer experience and the operational mechanics of the back-office migration. That existing footprint meant TTEC could move fast, without the ramp-up time needed by a new partner. 

Our solution 

Once the scale of the disruption became clear, TTEC created new processes and staffed with best practices to absorb the surge in customer demand. The response combined rapid capacity management with ongoing operational and technical coordination. The team conducted additional system testing, established a formal escalation process for improper billing, and provided support mechanisms to answer customer questions. 

Most importantly, TTEC tightened the reconciliation process used to verify that customer notices and billing communications were being issued correctly. Six additional checks and processes were added to help ensure billing accuracy. 

The strongest differentiator was TTEC’s ability to absorb an extreme volume surge while acting as a direct feedback loop between customers, front-line associates, and the client’s technical teams, helping identify and resolve issues during the migration. That feedback loop, connecting what callers were experiencing to the technical teams fixing the underlying problems, was what turned a reactive scramble into a structured recovery. 

Results 

The operational impact lasted approximately five months and performance recovered to standard targets. TTEC delivered three measurable recoveries during the crisis: 

Service level recovery: Service level fell to 33.47% in December 2023 during the migration disruption. TTEC subsequently recovered performance to its standard 95% service-level target by March 2024. 

Call abandonment improvement: Call abandonment decreased from 4.8% in December 2023 to 0.07% by March 2024, a 99% relative decrease. The contractual KPI target was 2%. 

Refund processing service level: Refund processing service levels improved from a low of 20.4% to 100% by January 2024. The standard KPI was 95%, with refunds required to be processed within four business days. 

Besides hard numbers, the client recognized TTEC as an “outstanding partner” during the system migration disruption and acknowledged the team’s support and expertise in managing the high-volume period. 

The work also created a scalable model. The client expanded the model into a new tolling region. The successful expansion was used by the client as evidence that the model could scale to additional territories and more expansion is planned.