Primavera Systems

Company: Primavera Systems

Profile

Founded in 1983, Primavera Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise and Web-based project management, control, and execution software. Headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, Primavera has offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Concord (New Hampshire), London, and Hong Kong. Primavera's products include project management, planning, and scheduling; methodology management; risk analysis; resource planning; issue tracking; and team communication for integrated project execution. 

Primavera software is also designed to easily integrate with other systems in the enterprise, including leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for a total business solution. Primavera's customer base spans a broad range of industries, including information technology, financial services, telecommunications, chemical processing, energy, engineering, construction, utilities, aerospace, and defense.

Challenge

Primavera was looking for a solution to support its customer service. It needed a robust solution for both of its contact centers in Concord, New Hampshire, and Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, to manage roughly 5000 phone calls and 100 Web requests from customers on a monthly basis. The solution had to meet the following requirements:

• Enable agents to derive value from every customer interaction
• Empower agents to view and manage all communications within a fully integrated solution
• Provide comprehensive reporting and monitoring to enable changes to be made instantly based on report findings
• Instill a sense of confidence that all customers are receiving the attention and responses they deserve
• Keep costs down
• Integrate with an existing Onyx software customer database

Solution

Taking into consideration the requirements they were looking for in a contact center solution, Primavera chose Apropos Technology's Multi-Channel Interaction Management Suite to manage phone and Web customer interactions. The Apropos Intelligent Call Distribution (ICD) system gave Primavera more control over call routing, distributing customer calls to the most appropriate agent in a quicker and more efficient fashion. Primavera also gained improved real-time visibility and more in-depth historical reporting functionality to better manage both of the company's contact centers with the Apropos solution.

Primavera uses the Apropos solution to manage inbound customer interactions within the contact center and to integrate with its existing Onyx customer database through Touch-Tone inputs into the interactive voice response (IVR) unit, without changing any hardware or software configurations. The flexibility and customization of the solution allows Primavera to service its customers based on individual needs. It allows CSRs to provide a high degree of relationship-based service through the ability to view incoming and outgoing customer interaction requests based on the interactions's priority or Primavera's specific business rules. Using these business rules also allows calls to be routed to the most appropriate agent and interactions to be managed on a priority basis.

In addition to handling interaction workflow, Apropos provides Primavera's contact center with a single point of management for systemwide agent, supervisor, and server configurations. The Apropos solution also enables Primavera to seamlessly manage all voice and Web customer interactions. Primavera's on-line customers have the flexibility to conduct interactions over the Internet through e-mail or Web collaboration and access to personal "live" assistance through either an interactive Web chat or voice interaction to help complete sales or service transactions.

Primavera also takes advantage of customizable voice features available in the Apropos product. These features includes automatic call distribution, programmable interactive voice response, voice mail management, voice recording, abandoned-call management, call blending, and text-to-speech automation.

Primavera's agents can monitor both of the firm's contact centers, which service all of its North American customers. This monitoring capability allows interactions received by the system to be tracked, alarmed, and reported on, which ultimately gives contact center managers accurate data on the performance of the center, allowing them to react in real time to any changing business conditions while monitoring quality assurance.

Primavera uses the Apropos Interaction Vault™ (iValult™) application to keep a record of interactions and gain instant access to interaction histories through archived records of all customer interactions. Apropos' iVault is a browser-based application. Its search capabilities allow Primavera's contact center agents and supervisors to immediately view the entire history of any interaction based on date, time, or business data. From a single source, agents and supervisors can review all previous customer communications from a variety of sources.

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved:

• Reduced research time from three hours to less than 15 minutes a week
• Improved real-time visibility and in-depth historical reporting functionality
• Improved data quality, allowing management to compare agent-recorded interaction metrics and notes found in their CRM application to reality
• Increased customer service with intelligent call distribution, providing more control over call routing and distributing customer calls to the most appropriate agent in a quicker and more efficient manner