Call Center Operation: Design, Operation, and Maintenance

5.1 Communications

Company: Axtel

Profile

Axtel is a provider of integrated telecommunication solutions in the recently liberalized Mexican market; it has 300 CSRs in its Monterrey contact center and handles over 18,000 calls per day.

Challenge

Axtel's workforce management system is fed information about the operation's activity, including key data such as peak call times, call duration, and agent workload. The system can then predict what will happen when advertising campaigns run and how exceptions such as these will affect the day-to-day operation of the contact center. The aim is a fairly simple one: increase the volume of calls handled without employing more agents and maintain the service level at 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds.

Solution

Axtel will soon be turning its Monterrey call center into a multimedia contact center and will use workforce management to ensure that the center has current performance measurement tools to obtain high levels of productivity and customer service.

Benefits

Benefits achieved include

• More efficient measurement of call center performance

• Capability to operate a multimedia contact center

Company: CLEAR Communications

Profile

CLEAR Communications is a New Zealand telecommunications services provider, founded in 1990, with call centers in Auckland and Christchurch. Surveys have indicated that CLEAR customers are impressed with the company's service; however, as the company has discovered, when customer service is improved, customers quickly progress through four stages: They appreciate it, they get used to it, they expect it, and they demand it.

Challenge

With strong competition in its marketplace, CLEAR posed this question to a group of managers and supervisors participating in a series of workshops: How do we stay ahead of the competition and meet customer expectations?

Solution

The results of the workshop session pointed to the critical requirement to continually assess current and future customer expectations. Leveraging customer feedback was considered important as the company moved into service innovations and improvements. Modest improvements were made to ensure that the organization was continually moving forward and therefore staying one step ahead of customer expectations.

Benefits

CLEAR has achieved about 20% market share in the New Zealand telecommunications sector because of its high level of customer service and favorable word-of-mouth advertising.

Company: diAx

Profile

diAx is a rapidly growing European telecom provider based in Switzerland. With its four contact centers and 720 agents, it takes up to 35,000 calls per day from its 1.3-million customer base.

Challenge

Implementing a virtual contact center has meant that each of the 38 agent skillsets available (such as language and specialized knowledge) has increased, as these skill pools are no longer location dependent. In a country like Switzerland, where the population speaks Italian, French, German, or English, the ability to present customers with as large a pool of CSR language skills as possible is critical to the success of the business.

Solution

The company's four contact centers were integrated to form a single, virtual contact center. Customers are given one telephone number, which gets routed correctly in 95% of cases from the calling-line identity (CLI).

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved:

• The solution implemented was supported by an open architecture.

• ACDs from separate leading manufacturers were integrated seamlessly into the virtual contact center infrastructure.

Company: Group Telecom

Profile

Group Telecom is a Canadian local exchange carrier offering next-generation telecommunications solutions to Canadian businesses. The company specializes in data, Internet applications, and voice products and services designed to improve the reliability of communications and the productivity and profitability of its customer's businesses. Group Telecom's portfolio of products and services of advanced business communication tools is provided over the company's own national fiber network and switching equipment.

Challenge

Group Telecom focuses on providing efficient support and excellent customer service and building a reputation as a leader in the telecommunications industry. The company needed a powerful call-management solution that would enhance customer support capabilities and reduce call-handling and call-transfer times. The software solution had to be flexible and scalable to support existing contact centers in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, and it had to be able to handle future growth.

Solution

Group Telecom chose the LGS Interaction Management Solution (IMS), based on the Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management Solution, to facilitate the company's vision of ECARE for its customer service contact center. This vendor solution was selected for the following reasons:

• Ease of use

• Ease of integration with existing switches

• Capacity for multimedia interactions (voice, e-mail, and Web inquiries)

• Rapid deployment (six-week target)

Using the queuing and distribution capabilities of Apropos, Group Telecom quickly routes callers to the proper department and most suitable agent.

Using a visual queue for inbound calls, voice mails, and e-mails, CSRs can identify priority customers and the reason for their call. It also captures information on abandoned calls so that CSRs can call back.

Benefits

The advantages of the IMS solution are

• One fully integrated solution residing on one platform with one central point of administration, reporting, and databasing

• Visual queuing that allows CSRs to preview calls and always routes calls to the best available agent, increasing both CSR and customer satisfaction

• Skill-based routing allowing agents multiple queues

• The ability of supervisors to monitor the call center from their desktops in real time, including call load, call disposition, and the activity of individual CSRs, and to allocate CSRs among queues in real time

• Analysis of calls to improve operations

• Flexibility to utilize many different switching platforms in a number of different locations and customer transactions

• Significant increase in CSR productivity

• Simple administration—one server to handle incoming calls and e-mails

• Insight into quantity and purpose of calls through robust reporting tools

• Insight into the efficiency of its contact center

• Increased customer satisfaction

Company: GTE Telecommunications Services (GTE TSI)

Profile

GTE Telecommunications Services, based in Tampa, Florida, is a global supplier of interoperability solutions for wireless paging and Internet service providers. In addition to operating the world's largest wireless data clearinghouse, GTE TSI's broad array of products includes interstandard wireless roaming solutions, intelligent network services, fraud management solutions, and other types of service bureau applications that simplify the complex technical and business relationships existing in today's competitive global telecommunications industry.

Challenge

GTE TSI needed to easily communicate through various media types, including e-mail, inbound and outbound calls, and voice mail. In addition, the company could only track and monitor calls but required a system that could easily interface with customers on a more personal, prioritized basis. Finally, the company was challenged with the inability to produce adequate reports or measure sufficient data from multiple interaction types, and it needed these business metrics and tools to further optimize the customer support hotline center.

Solution

GTE TSI selected and successfully implemented the Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management system. The Apropos system routes, tracks, and reports on all inbound and outbound interactions. In addition to Apropos, GTE TSI uses Remedy's CRM application to provide agents with "screen pops" containing customer information. To complement the Remedy system, Apropos prioritizes and escalates each interaction according to business rules, providing the capability of managing each interaction based on its value to the business. The Apropos system also includes a comprehensive reporting system that fully supports management's requirements and assists in delivering superior service to customers.

Benefits

• Full caller data and prioritization—enhances the CSR's ability to deliver a quicker and more efficient response.

• Reporting across all media types—enables the center to improve service levels and increase productivity

• Fully integrated multimedia capabilities—allows customers to effectively communicate through various media types and increases the capability to satisfy customers as they contact the center

Company: Nokia

Profile

Nokia, headquartered in Irving, Texas, is a world leader in mobile communications. Backed by its experience, innovation, user-friendliness, and secure solutions, the company has become a major supplier of mobile phones and mobile fixed and IP networks.

Challenge

Nokia's Information Management Group realized the need to have better insight into the types of calls received by the contact center. Nokia needed a solution that would provide insight into all support center activities and easily create and generate reports. Improved call-routing capabilities and a system that could handle fax services were also required. The solution had to meet current needs and business challenges and be capable of integrating with existing systems.

Solution

The Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management Suite was chosen for five of Nokia's contact centers throughout the world because of its intelligent, skills-based routing feature that automatically directs customers to specific customer support representatives for personalized handling. The system also provides the capability to manage and monitor all customer interactions and includes comprehensive reporting.

The initial implementation included voice, voice mail, and fax-back features, which enabled CSRs to fax information from the desktop. Shortly afterwards, Nokia also implemented the e-mail application, an enterprise-class solution designed specifically for e-commerce, to provide a unified mechanism for blending, prioritizing, and escalating e-mail interactions in the flow of all customer interactions within their support center.

Benefits

The selected vendor solution provided the following benefits:

• Intelligent, skills-based routing—assigns calls to the appropriate agent, delivering a more efficient and quicker response

• Comprehensive report tolls—measures service and performance levels and enables management to make well-informed business decisions

• Multichannel solution—allows customer support representatives to respond to and effectively serve their customers regardless of how they choose to communicate with the center.