The last thing contact center agents need is another place to look

Quality counts

Contact centers live and breathe numbers. But the number by which they live and die is the one that attaches to call quality. On this front DB leads the industry, maintaining a 95-plus per cent measure of call quality. It’s seen them scoop awards in three categories at the New Zealand CRM Contact Center Awards (http://www.crmconsulting.co.nz/) in 2012 and 2013.

DB’s contact center manages a blend of calls. Outbound calls alert the smaller retail and on premise customers to promotions and campaigns. Another team manages inbound calls which handle a host of enquiries like placing orders, delivery updates, sponsorship enquiries and product advice.

DB Customer Contact Center manager Rosanne Judson says training is a big factor in her team’s success. So is mastery of the contact center’s tools of trade – CRM software.

In Jan 2013 DB, a long time SAP user for ERP, made the decision to migrate to SAP’s CRM solution. The move remodelled DB’s contact center system on SAP’s CRM platform. Telephony integration was a key requirement of the project.

Call control

DB’s Customer Contact Center agents perform multiple tasks to successfully complete a customer call. Control buttons that manage call workflow are at the center of activity. Agents also rely on screen pops (prompted by telephone number recognition), which present customer details within the SAP screen. Call details, including call abandons, time taken to answer and talk-time, are captured for reporting.

To do their best work, agents required a simple, one-screen experience. Behind the scenes, technologists had to tightly integrate Avaya call technology and SAP CRM – a process that under ordinary circumstances is fraught with the potential for error. And the last thing anyone wanted was a plague of IT fixes.

So how did DB successfully integrate its Avaya platform with SAP in just six weeks? Virsae Contact Center (VCC) SAP Connector did the job.

Dialling in Virsae Contact Center

VCC SAP Connector – methodology and pre-built software – beds Avaya call control buttons in SAP’s frontend CRM system, presenting agents with a single SAP screen to maintain full control of customer interactions. Caller line information matches customer data with live calls, and ‘pops’ details to the agent. Other control buttons let agents answer calls, put callers on hold, and retrieve and transfer calls.

VCC SAP Connector processes and connections are preconfigured and tested according to SAP protocols, making integration quick, easy, and safe.

Six weeks’ work

DB business analyst Wayne Harris is responsible for IS aspects of DB’s call center operation. It puts him at the center of application and integration projects.

Harris said the integration project was flagged as a risk, because it was an “unknown” and the tight six-week deadline was immovable.

“But what gave me the biggest nerves turned out to be the best executed part of the larger SAP project,” he said. “It was the first time we had used Virsae to perform integration. The project was well managed and supported with good technical resources. Virsae did a great job.”

Down the track, Harris is targeting new integration that will populate SAP with telephony information – including talk-time and time taken to answer. The initiative will improve reporting by adding telephony data to existing client reports.

Technology systems have mastered information capture. However, information only gets you so far. It must be coordinated with workflow and presented at the right times, so workers make good decisions at critical moments.