AT&T has completed a $12.4 million upgrade to the Internal Revenue Service’s call centers that is one of the first and largest deployments ever of Cisco’s Customer Voice Portal infrastructure, according to AT&T.

AT&T upgraded the hardware, software and circuits that the IRS uses to support 26 call centers nationwide. The call centers employ 8,000 IRS agents, who process more than 130 million calls annually.

Thanks to the upgrade, IRS can now route calls on a nationwide basis rather than regionally. This means calls can go to the next available IRS specialist regardless of where that specialist is located.

The goal of the upgrade was to improve the efficiency of the IRS call centers as well as to respond faster to citizens who call with questions.

“It really improves the customer experience as they call into the 800 number,” says Frank Black, sales director for AT&T’s Treasury business. “A customer gets to an agent more qualified to deal with the tax payer’s question and gets delivered to that agent quicker than they had previously.”

AT&T upgraded the call centers from running on Cisco’s Internet Service Node (ISN) technology to Cisco’s Customer Voice Portal platform, which is next-generation technology. The new platform uses VoIP technology inside the IRS’ LANs and WANs, but it is not using IP toll-free calling.

AT&T completed the upgrade last December, before the IRS went into lockdown mode with its IT systems. The IRS does not make any changes to its IT systems from Jan. 1 through April 15 during the tax filing season.

“We had about six months to do this upgrade,” says Jeff Hays, client business manager for the IRS with AT&T. “The size of the footprint and the amount of technology that we deployed was huge.”

The IRS call center infrastructure is based on Cisco technology, so AT&T did not consider any other product besides Cisco’s Customer Voice Portal for the upgrade.

“This is the largest deployment in the world of its kind,” Black says of the Cisco Customer Voice Portal.

Although the upgrade happened months ago, the IRS’s CIO awarded AT&T the contract in May because the call center upgrade was so successful.

AT&T is making Cisco’s Customer Voice Portal available to other government and commercial clients.

“This is one of the core services that we provide to AT&T customers and CIOs around the world,” Black says. “We have a center dedicated solely to managing this type of service.”