Crystal Decisions | Technology

Company: Crystal Decisions

Profile

Crystal Decisions, of Vancouver, BC, a Seagate Company, is a leading software developer of solutions that enable organizations to analyze, manage, and protect the hidden value of critical corporate information. With over 20 offices worldwide, Crystal Decisions' Vancouver contact center provides technical support to customers all over the world.

Challenge

Because Crystal Decisions supports everything from shrink-wrapped customer products that sell for less than $200 to multimillion-dollar corporate installations, the company needed to find a way to support customers across this broad spectrum consistently. A key requirement was to identify customers who had basic 60-day free support and high-end customers who were paying for premium customer service.

Supervisors were especially challenged. The closest thing the company had to real-time information was a periodic recycling of the message reader board. Crystal Decisions had 14 queues, so 14 message boards were downloaded to the network and flashed every minute. With contact center offices operating from Vancouver, Florida, Texas, Australia, and the United Kingdom, an enterprisewide interaction management solution became a critical requirement for a seamless information flow regardless of media type or physical location.

Solution

After careful evaluation of a half-dozen vendors, Crystal Decisions chose LGS Group and its Interaction Management Solutions (IMS) system to deliver the Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management Solution. The IMS solution emphasized "agent empowerment." The capability of Apropos to display all interactions and allow agents to select those calls that took priority, had been waiting longest, or fell into a specialty area helped them be prepared and proactive when answering a call. A caller preview function allowed agents to see caller information while calls are still in the queue. In addition, integration with the corporate customer relationship management (CRM) database provided a screen pop of the customer's data on the legacy system. Agents had immediate access to customers' detailed records, providing consistent and effective support to every customer.

When customers call, they are asked to enter their product registration number and/or call incident number. Calls are routed based on these numbers. If customers have a valid support contract or are entitled to 60-day free support, they are identified and, based on their support contract, placed in the appropriate queue. This important functions allows Crystal Decisions to recover lost revenue by segmenting clients into those who have 60-day free software support or those whose contract has expired.

Benefits

The following benefits have been achieved with this vendor solution:

·         Customers can check telephone wait times on Crystal Decisions' technical support Website.

·         The scalability and flexibility of the system made it easy for the company to grow to its present 250 agents in over 100 different workgroups (skill-based and product-based) in five contact centers around the world.

·         Cradle-to-grave reporting capabilities and resource management tools enable supervisors to monitor CSR activities easily and conveniently, to move agents from one queue to another quickly, and to make agents with various skills available to more callers.

·         An alarm notification feature enables supervisors to control the contact.

·         Supervisors can switch agents from one queue to another immediately or place agents in multiple queues.

·         All interactions received by the system can be tracked and reported.

·         Supervisors can set up various alarms to notify them and/or agents of any unusual activities that could disrupt operations.

·         Managers are provided with accurate data on the total number and type of interactions received, how many have been serviced, by whom, for how long, and at which location.

·         Supervisors can monitor the center from their desktop—real-time information about activities are graphically displayed.

·         Supervisors can choose from a variety of canned reports on interaction, agent, and queue activity—real-time and historical.

·         Dozens of custom reports are created that merge Apropos data and other enterprisewide data in a format that specifically addresses senior management issues.

·         Allowing certain agents to specialize in "trouble" calls has cut the duration of these calls in half.

·         E-mail management capability has resulted in $1.20 per minute savings for interactions in the Asia Pacific region.

·         The ability to check telephone wait times on the Web has encouraged customers to purchase premium technical support where the wait times are always very low, thus adding greatly to company revenues.

·         A more complete database of customers is available, because every client needs to register the product before obtaining support.

·         IVR functionality, shorter wait times, choice of music or silence while on hold, and ability to check call wait times on the Web have all contributed to a significantly higher level of customer satisfaction.