Retail | Call Center Case Studies

Company: Bargain Network

Profile

Bargain Network specializes in locating "distressed sale" opportunities for its network members. It is one of the leading merchandise search engines for real estate foreclosures, government-seized merchandise, and live auction events. The company offers live agents to assist customers on a 24-hour basis.

Challenge

For a contact center such as Bargain Network, customer service is top priority. With a call volume of 12,000 calls per day, supervisors understand the need to monitor, record, and store all communications between agent and customer for both liability and quality assurance. The company had been recording critical communications using simple cassette tapes and off-the-shelf tape recorders. As the business grew, the quality of the recording and archiving was not meeting the high standards required, and the company was not able to realize the full potential of recorded information. The challenge was to find and implement a cost-effective, reliable, and easy-to-use solution for real-time digital data recording.

Solution

Bargain Networks selected Voice Print International (VPI) to upgrade its call and data recording systems to meet the challenges. VPI's system allowed the company to optimize the time used servicing customers.

Benefits

The solution selected by the company provided the following benefits:

§  Capability of monitoring both verbal and electronic communication between agents and customers

§  Re-creation of the customer experience and evaluation of CSR performance by reviewing communication via phone, fax, e-mail, and/or the Web

§  Archiving of calls to DVD-RAM, a reliable, long-term storage media enabling CSRs to locate data with pinpoint accuracy within seconds

Company: Borders Group

Profile

Borders Group, a Fortune 500 company, is a leading global retailer of books, music, movies, and other related items. Through its affiliates, Borders operates over 340 Borders Books and Music stores in the United States as well as 17 international Borders stores, approximately 860 Waldenbooks locations, and 32 U.K.-based Books etc. stores.

Challenge

The seasonal nature of Borders' business combined with its multiskilled contact center made optimizing its workforce a formidable challenge. The company plans for its staffing needs well in advance of the holiday season, when customer expectations are higher than usual and business volume is high. During this period, there is an over 35% surge in call volume, making optimizing available resources and staff essential. Overstaffing costs could significantly cut into profit margins, whereas understaffing at such a critical time of the year would be disastrous.

In addition to planning for significantly increased call volumes, Borders Group had a variety of complex criteria to be considered in developing the optimal schedule, which included 15 contact center skills, employee work preferences, and seniority-based scheduling.

Solution

The company chose Blue Pumpkin software to resolve its call center management requirement and ran a series of "what-if" staffing scenarios to design a workforce optimization strategy that accurately reflected all of Borders' business goals. Based upon a staff selection plan generated by Blue Pumpkin software, Borders Group knew exactly how many seasonal workers to hire as well as both the number of hours and skills required, making the hiring process much easier.

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved:

§  Reduced turnover of nonseasonal employees from 15 to 10%

§  Reduced overall recruiting and training expenses by 25%

§  Increased agent productivity by 53%, with a 33% reduction in expenses by allocating agent time more effectively over operating hours

§  Achieved customer service levels of 88% during the holiday period, with most calls answered in less than 10 seconds

§  Reduced costs and delivered a high level of customer service

§  Improved skillsets of seasonal staff and enabled them to get on the phones 33% faster, allowing them to be productive in one week instead of three

Company: HSN (Home Shopping Network)

Profile

HSN is a division of USA Networks Inc., a leader in TV and Internet-based direct retailing. The company received more than 68 million sales and service calls in 1999 and generated $1.2 billion in sales.

Challenge

When HSN's two contact centers became too busy at peak times, a percentage of calls were routed to a third-party provider. This percentage could only be changed every 15 minutes, which meant that agents in HSN's contact centers could be idle while the calls were still being routed to the third party. As well, HSN elected to route calls from frequent customers to a specific CSR to strengthen relationships and loyalty.

Solution

To resolve this situation with the third-party provider, HSN installed a load-balancing system for multiple call center sites. Routing calls to a specific CSR was accomplished by using intelligent voice recognition (IVR) and an analysis by a voice-print-enabled IVR. This feature enabled the company to check security and provide the customer's personal CSR with all the up-to-date information requested.

Benefits

The following benefits have been achieved:

§  Using the universal queue and dynamic enterprise routing strategies, HSN can immediately decide which of the three contact centers will receive the call.

§  Overflow calls can be routed to the third party only when agents at both HSN sites are operating at full capacity, keeping HSN's costs at a minimum.

§  Customers can now contact CSRs familiar with their profiles and purchasing requirements.

Real estate | Call Center Case Studies

Company: Oxford Properties Group

Profile

Oxford Properties operates an extensive building maintenance organization that services over 25 million square feet of premium office space across Canada.

Challenge

Good tenant relations is a key to success in the real estate business. The extent of Oxford's real estate holdings required its maintenance staff to respond to building maintenance requests quickly and efficiently. A recent tenant satisfaction survey indicated there was room for improvement in the following areas: ease of contact, response times, and satisfaction with problem resolutions.

Solution

To provide the best possible service experience for their tenants, Oxford's management team identified three primary objectives:

§  Eliminate confusion by consolidating three regional centers into a single, multichannel center

§  Adopt a service level commitment for the contact center to answer 90% of calls within 10 seconds.

§  Establish a target of having a service person on site within 30 minutes 95% of the time.

To realize these goals—and to ensure that their building maintenance group was a positive asset that would strengthen tenant loyalty—Oxford selected Bell Canada's call center project management resources to assist its internal team in designing an innovative program, called 310-MAXX, to manage the 30-minute service mandate on orders coming into its building maintenance organization.

With the 310-MAXX program, Oxford tenants simply make a service request call to 310-MAXX from anywhere in Canada or log on to Oxford's building maintenance Website. To turn their vision into reality, Oxford Properties also partnered with Bell Contact Centre Solutions to assist in the start-up and management of the contact center.

The first phase focused on preparing the new, centralized, multichannel facility to handle the increased traffic. This included adding or upgrading the following elements:

§  Megalink Access Services

§  PBX

§  310 service

§  In-house cabling

§  A Symposium server and Symposium set installation

It also involved providing extensive professional services to help with the hiring of CSRs and supervisors, initial CSR training, metrics to measure and manage advances in the center, change management to involve contact center staff in implementing "best practices." This major corporate effort was supported by having all of the key ingredients in place, including top-down sponsorship from the president and CEO, a dedicated team of over 45 people who implemented the changes, the involvement of every telephone agent, and training to close any gaps in knowledge and skills.

Benefits

The modified call center and enhanced communication resources were up and running in seven weeks and provided the following benefits:

§  Customers can now submit service requests directly, 24 hours a day, via phone or Web and can track the status of their service request online or by calling 310-MAXX.

§  Once the job is complete, customers receive confirmation via e-mail.

§  Tenants and Oxford Properties alike can use the Web-enabled tracking system to monitor request patterns and predict future maintenance needs.

§  92% of customer calls are answered in 10 seconds, on a daily basis.

§  Productivity has increased by 106%.

§  Quality has increased by 100%.

§  Purdue University's Call Center Benchmarking Study ranked Oxford's improved system #4 in its industry group.

§  A national disaster contingency plan was implemented.

Health care | Call Center Case Studies

Company: Delta Dental Plan of Kentucky

Profile

The company manages dental plans for a broad range of client companies. In just a few months, Delta's customer service call center dramatically improved productivity by changing its call center performance metrics.

Solution

The company decided to revamp its use of existing technology, implement a stricter schedule-adherence policy, and introduce new incentive, quality, and team-building programs for its CSRs.

The first task for the call center's manager of customer service was to review how calls were handled. The 10-agent center takes about 30,000 calls monthly from plan providers, members, group administrators, and insurance brokers and agents. Initially, callers enter an interactive voice response unit where they can get automated information, such as the status of their claims. If they opt out of the automated system, the center's ACD routes the calls to CSRs.

One of the problems with the manner in which the center was handling calls was that CSRs were making decisions themselves as to how much time they needed to spend on after-call work. Calls were routed from the IVR to the CSR's phones, but each agent could decide when to answer these calls. The solution was to change CSR priorities.

A stricter schedule-adherence policy was introduced, requiring all CSRs to work on seven-and-a-half-hour shifts and be available 95% of that time. As well, a tiered structure for routing calls through the ACD was introduced.

Benefits

Specific benefits that were realized include the following:

§  The average speed of answer dropped from more than 200 seconds to less than 20 seconds.

§  Call abandonment, previously more than 12%, virtually disappeared, to less than 2%.

§  Long-distance costs dropped by 20%, in spite of a 10% increase in call volume.

§  Fewer angry callers meant agents were less stressed, which has improved overall morale.

§  Formal performance-based programs for both individuals and teams were organized, with appropriate awards ranging from gift certificates and gift baskets to time off.

§  Call-handling and off-work time were scheduled more efficiently, and a formal call-quality program was established to ensure continuous top performance.

Company: Philips Oral Healthcare

Profile

Philips Oral Healthcare, Inc., formerly Optiva Corporation, located in Snoqualmie, Washington, manufactures Sonicare, a high-tech toothbrush that uses patented sonic technology, fluid dynamics, and electromechanical design to aid in dental care. The company sells its products in the United States through warehouse clubs, mass merchandisers, department stores, and other outlets as well as distributing its products in Canada, Europe, and Japan.

Challenge

In the early days, Optiva's Customer Support Group consisted of 5 CSRs who received about 8,000 inbound calls per month. Its CRM solution was DOS-based, limited in functionality, and lacked reporting capabilities. From 1996 onward, Optiva experienced exponential growth and increased the number of CSRs to 52. A solution was required to manage customer relationships better and the large volume of calls and increased number of accounts contacting the center.

Solution

In 1997, Optiva implemented the Onyx Customer Care Solution, and in the following year, selected the Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management solution to provide the additional functionality needed and to integrate seamlessly with the existing Onyx database. The Apropos system increased the visibility of the center's activities, enhanced management's ability to extract data, and provided robust reporting capabilities.

Benefits

The benefits of the combined vendor call-management software included the following:

§  Caller ID, intelligent routing, and screen pops of information

§  Access to pertinent caller data

§  Reduction in time of call handling by an average of 30 seconds

§  CTI capabilities that enable CSRs to call back customers who may have abandoned the multimedia queue

§  Robust reporting capabilities providing real-time information and business metrics to improve overall productivity and enhance the customer's experience

Company: University of Alabama Health Services Foundation, P.C.

Profile

The University of Alabama Health Services Foundation, P.C., is a nonprofit physician group practice that is a member of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Health System. Since its beginning in 1973, the Health Services Foundation has grown to include almost 700 faculty, fellows, and physicians offering services in 33 specialties. These services are reinforced by the research and educational programs of UAB's Academic Health Center, resulting in patient care that is innovative, medically advanced, internationally renowned, and highly compassionate. The physicians of the Health Services Foundation are affiliated with UAB Hospital and the Kirklin Clinic at UAB, which houses most outpatient activities. The foundation formed the Management Services Organization in 1999 and consolidated operations and systems to manage activities related to revenue cycle, including billing and receivables management.

Challenge

Approximately 30% of the foundation's small-balance patient accounts cost more to collect than the actual payment. With limited resources available for collection, these balances often were referred to collection agencies.

Solution

The foundation selected two products from Avaya: Proactive Contact Management and Self-Service Solutions, which were combined to provide a solution to the collections problem that gained additional revenue while freeing resources for other important tasks. With these solutions, the foundation created a virtual payment center designed to automate outgoing calls to patients via predictive dialing and immediately provide patients with an avenue for self-payment using interactive voice response.

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved:

§  Maximization of the collection center's performance at the lowest cost

§  An additional $50,000 in revenue each month

§  Happier customers and better financial performance

§  Reduction by 27% in the number of agents needed to handle complex inquiries

§  All incoming calls regarding billing questions directed to the interactive voice response system first

§  The option for patients to quickly, independently, and confidentially manage their requests

Toronto Community Housing Corporation | Government

Company: Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC)

Profile

Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) is a municipal government organization that manages 57,500 residential rental units in the city of Toronto. TCHC sees the key to its success as the ability to operate at the community level to respond to customer issues quickly and effectively. Inquiries include housing availability, waiting list status, rent payments, maintenance requests, and safety concerns, among a variety of other tenant-related issues.

Challenge

After years of striving for a better operational model, TCHC recognized it required a community-based approach to service more effectively its diversified client base brought about by the amalgamation of two municipal housing organizations. TCHC faced the challenge of providing personalized, responsive service from multiple locations at a lower cost, which required an innovative solution to address the infrastructure requirements, increase the level of customer service, and provide flexibility for future change while mitigating the associated costs. In addition, TCHC wanted to eliminate the numerous phone numbers it currently listed for contacting the company, thus making it easier for customers to get in touch.

The company has 16 community offices throughout metropolitan Toronto supported by one central response/contact center. The challenge was getting a call to the "right resource the first time" with minimal effort. A superior enterprisewide call management solution was needed to provide seamless information flow regardless of physical location and to provide the capability to track, report, and analyze all customer interactions.

Solution

TCHC needed a long-term, flexible, and expandable system. It selected the Apropos Interaction Management Solutions (IMS) to meet its challenges. With its sophisticated call-handling features, IMS enabled the organization to manage the following business activities:

§  Route calls across Toronto to the best resource using just one phone number, regardless of whether that resource was located at a central or remote site.

§  Facilitate amalgamation and decentralization to community offices by reducing negative customer service impacts but without reducing CSR productivity.

§  Change the number of locations and size of the community offices/ contact centers in the future without significant infrastructure costs.

§  Provide 24-hour service with live CSRs via a virtual contact center without the need to operate all 16 community units after hours.

§  Manage a centralized system by installing a single point of configuration and administration.

§  Gain openness and flexibility by integrating with existing infrastructure and allowing migration to new systems resulting from amalgamation.

§  Gain PBX independence by interfacing with existing PBX and Centrex lines.

§  Route calls effectively through an integrated, robust ACD.

§  Identify the client through calling line identification (CLID) and route the call to the appropriate community office based on data in the corporate client database.

§  By identifying callers through CLID, find matches over 70% of the time, saving staff time and providing the added "security" that staff are speaking with the correct party.

§  Through the caller preview function, allow agents to preview caller information, such as caller name, building, and suite number, prior to answering; agents know at a glance who, why, how many, and how long customers are waiting in queue.

§  Integrate with the corporate database applications to provide an application-specific screen-pop of the customer's data on the legacy system.

§  Determine instantly in the visual queue which building is experiencing an emergency and is calling over the special phone line that deals specifically with elevator emergencies. Since emergency calls are taken out of queue and dealt with immediately, agents can speak "live" with persons who may be trapped inside the elevator and keep them calm until help arrives.

Benefits

The integration of the Apropos solution has greatly improved customer service and productivity at TCHC. The solution has had a positive impact on TCHC's services in these specific, main areas:

§  The volume of calls is down from 17,500 per month to 15,000 over a 12-month period, mostly because of improved client interactions resulting in reduced repeat calls.

§  Busy signals have been eliminated.

§  Average hold times have been reduced by 50% over the last 12 months.

§  85% of TCHC tenant callers receive automated, personalized service.

§  Rapport with customers has improved.

§  Flexibility allows menu options designed to meet the characteristics of each community.

§  Clients need to dial just one phone number to get answers to their inquiries.

§  The centralized database makes it easy to track customer issues, thus constantly improving service and ensuring a consistent and seamless flow of information.

Nordea, Merita Bank & PNC Bank | Financial services

Company: Nordea, Merita Bank

Profile

Nordea, Merita Bank of Sweden runs eight contact centers in its home country and four in Finland and two in Denmark. More than 1,000 CSRs deal with 120,000 contacts per day from a customer base of nine million individuals and 700,000 companies.

Challenge

To improve efficiency and customer service levels by adopting the latest call center technology.

Solution

The company's operations are heavily oriented around IVR—which amounted to 85% of contacts—and, increasingly, the Internet. If customers wished to speak with a CSR, they could do so and all IVR-captured information was passed along with the call. To manage the high customer contact volume, the company created virtual contact centers and augmented its existing technology with advanced call management and routing systems.

Benefits

The virtual contact center infrastructure provided the following benefits:

§  Dynamic load balancing across sites, making the workload fairer

§  Improvements in call center operation for both customers and CSRs

Company: PNC Bank

Profile

PNC Bank is a major U.S. bank with over 770 branches and more than $77 billion in assets. Incoming contacts to the call center are identified and segmented according to specific customer attributes. The contact is then passed to a consultant, who not only helps the customer with a particular need but also introduces other financial products.

Challenge

The company needed to streamline its call management process and to provide more information directly to its CSRs and outside consultants.

Solution

The company used the universal queue model for cross selling financial products and found that this call management process provided significant benefits.

Benefits

The benefits achieved include the following:

§  Customer and product information now appear as a "screen pop" on the agent's screen as the call arrives.

§  Call times have decreased by between 12 and 30 seconds per call, depending on the type of contact.

§  Customer satisfaction ratings and profits have increased.

Company: MetLife Investors Group | Financial services

Profile

MetLife Investors Group is an affiliate of MetLife, America's largest life insurer. MetLife serves 1 out of every 11 American households and 86 of the Fortune 100 companies. The company offers a full line of financial products, state-of-the-art technology capabilities, and high-touch service, with a primary goal of making business easier for the intermediary. The company is comprised of two insurance groups, as well as an investment management entity. MetLife Investors' products include a range of variable annuities, distributed through registered investment advisors, financial planners, regional broker-dealers, wirehouses, and banks.

Challenge

MetLife Investors' CSRs must be equipped with the necessary tools to ensure they are servicing their customers in the right manner. This means making it possible for customers to contact company investment agents via any communication medium they choose—phone, fax, e-mail, or Web—and enabling agents to effectively and efficiently service customers while properly managing all interactions. Additionally, MetLife Investors recognized that efficiently handling customer interactions was not enough. CSRs must derive value from every customer interaction, making each and every interaction matter.

Solution

In addition to seeking a contact center solution that supported multichannel forms of communication, MetLife Investors needed a comprehensive solution to support its two customer service centers, encompassing its sales and administrative departments, located in Newport Beach, California and Des Moines, Iowa. The two centers supported 250 CSRs, more than 150,000 financial brokers, and millions of consumers who contact the company to obtain account information. MetLife Investors was seeking a fully integrated call center solution to meet the following requirements:

§  Skills-based routing and intelligent routing with alerts based on business parameters

§  Informing agents about the interactions waiting to be handled

§  Identifying callers

§  Enabling investment agents to form strong relationships with customers

§  Continuously improving service

§  Keeping costs down when implementing a new solution

The Apropos' Interaction Management Solution was chosen to help manage all customer interactions, and Channel Parity was selected to design and implement solutions for multi-channel centers. Together with Apropos, these two vendor solutions enabled MetLife Investors to facilitate a single consistent view of customers across all communication channels.

Benefits

The benefits to the company were several, including the following:

§  Helped drive millions of dollars in revenue by supporting customer interactions

§  Enabled the core business to function efficiently and effectively

§  Provided an efficient and consistent level of customer service—regardless of how they chose to communicate with the company

§  Increased CSR productivity by providing intelligent call routing to the appropriate agent group or individual, based on CSR skillsets, customer history, and so on

§  Improved visibility of customer information allowing agents to sustain high call volumes while providing high-quality service.

The Depository Trust Company & Liberty Funds Group | Financial services

Company: The Depository Trust Company (DTC)

Profile

DTC, headquartered in New York, is the world's largest securities depository, holding nearly $20 trillion in assets for its members and their customers. DTC is a national clearinghouse for the settlement of trades in corporate, municipal, and mortgage-backed securities and performs asset services for its participating banks and broker/dealers.

Challenge

With only 30 CSRs supporting over 3,500 internal and 30,000 external customers at its help desk, DTC was challenged with providing the support necessary to efficiently manage the large volume of calls received daily. The company realized that it had no way to monitor the types of calls received, and agents were managing different types of customer requests without any advance notification of who was calling or why. It was also difficult to measure or gauge the center's level of service because there were no real-time reporting tools or capabilities. DTC needed a solution that would address these continuous challenges and that would also integrate easily into its existing database application.

Solution

The Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management Suite seamlessly integrated into DTC's existing database application, allowing for up-front automation and identification of callers. This enabled CSRs to access and view information about callers so that their response was more accurate and efficient.

Apropos prioritizes and escalates each interaction according to business rules, which gave DTC the ability to truly manage interactions based on the value to the business. By storing and displaying the interactions in a multimedia queue, the system assisted in the effective management of the numerous calls received. In addition, the real-time reporting feature allowed management to examine help desk activities and assisted in making better-informed business decisions.

Benefits

The vendor solution provided the following benefits:

• Cradle-to-grave reporting—provides full insight into center activities, allowing management to make better, more informed decisions based on actual business data and improved productivity
• Prioritizing and escalation rules—accommodates unique business and service-level requirements, delivering a more personalized and effective response
• Improved visibility of caller information—ensures that customers will receive more efficient service, increasing customer satisfaction
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Company: Liberty Funds Group

Profile

Liberty Funds Group is an integrated asset accumulation and management organization. Its operating companies manage $66 billion of assets for investors worldwide through an array of fixed, indexed, and variable annuities; private and institutional accounts; and mutual funds. Liberty Funds brings together the investment expertise of a select group of money management firms known throughout the industry for their strong track record of success.

Challenge

With locations in Colorado and Boston and over 200 agents who were being recorded daily, Liberty Funds Group had decided to upgrade its recording system from a removable media-based system to an on-line storage-based system. It was important that the new solution could directly integrate digitally with the existing Aspect ACD and Northern PBX systems and be easy to use. As well, because Liberty Funds Group is required by law to store all recordings for up to seven years, the company required a long-term, network-attached storage solution.

Solution

Liberty Funds chose Voice Print International (VPI) because it needed to store all of its data on-line in the most reliable system with the largest on-line storage capacity. VPI's standard solution provides the client with over 11,000 channel hours of on-line storage for instant playback of audio files stored in compressed .wav format. VPI compresses the audio files using industry-standard GSM compression. Because GSM compression is Microsoft native, standard media players recognize the GSM codes and can play back the attached .wav file without additional software downloads.

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved:

• CSRs can quickly and easily find a record and display it.
• The company can define how thousands of hours of recorded transaction activity can be effectively managed to meet their strategic operational information management needs.
• Whether voice or screen capture video or the two synchronized together, the client dictates where the record is archived, how long it is archived, how it is retrieved, and how it will be used in the future.
• The RAID5 storage configuration used by VPI allows clients to store as many hours as its business or the law dictates, while offering high reliability through redundancy.