Smart Telecom Case Study
Communicating in a Smart Way
The Customer
Smart Telecom plc, formed in 2000, is the second largest provider of corporate, SME, residential and public service telecommunications services in Ireland. The company offers homes and businesses the highest quality voice, data and broadband telecommunications services at the lowest possible rates.
The Challenges
The system and departmental landscape was complex, with a variety of product sales and customer servicing tools and departments each having been built in different and often ad-hoc ways. To ensure that users within the sales, account management, order fulfillment and customer care functions could access appropriate data as well as collaborate and monitor performance in a more effective way, Smart Telecom required significant integration and re-engineering of both product sales and services, business processes and technologies.
The Solution
The project strategy given the scope of business objectives was evolutionary, recommending that change was introduced incrementally using a phased delivery approach. Employing a business process management approach to requirements, phase one sought to automate, report and integrate on the mobile sales force processes, while phase two introduced supporting case, contact and work management solutions.
Sales Engine
In phase one, Sword Ciboodle (mobile) was implemented over handheld PDA devices, providing the Smart Telecom field sales force with an innovative and efficient customer management tool. The solution encompassed sales campaign management and empowered field sales personnel to:
- Organize and manage their workload, through downloading batches of prospects based on current location
- Proactively manage appointments
- Capture a ‘Proof of Premise’ image and signature
- Input an order and process a sale in ‘real-time’
Integrating the point of sale solution directly to back office order fulfillment systems not only increased staff productivity, but removed cumbersome and costly process breaks such as paper based hand-offs. That way, sales personnel spent more time selling and less time on administration. The reporting suite that included dashboards allowed employee sales performance to be proactively monitored, and compared to targets.
Contact Center
Phase two tackled the integration of the service business unit with sales. Sword Ciboodle was implemented as the single contact centre desktop application, providing full visibility and tracking of all sales and service customer interactions and correspondence. Embedded work management functionality and processing ensured that no work was lost during process handoffs. Proactive SLA monitoring capabilities provided visibility of pending SLA thresholds and breaches. Intelligent skills based routing delivered the right task, to the right person at the right time with full administration rights for business users. Phase two also extended performance management reporting capabilities into the service departments.
The Benefits
- Delivered consistent, compelling customer experience at every touch point
- Single view of the customer across the organization
- Full performance metrics and reporting facilities for sales and service management
- Increased employee efficiency within the contact center
- Empowered mobile workforce
The Results
Smart Telecom’s requirements were for a solution that would underpin outstanding customer service and enable us to have world-class systems to support our rapid growth. Sword Ciboodle has delivered exactly that.
Since implementation was completed in summer of 2006, Smart Telecom have found themselves better equipped to recognize customers as individuals and ensure that, regardless of contact touch point, employees deliver consistent and accurate customer messages. Furthermore, both staff and management are seeing important project benefits realized:
- Increased customer satisfaction - customer issues to be resolved at the first point of call, thereby reducing customer query resolution time.
- Cost savings – unnecessary paperwork and process hand-offs have been eradicated and time to complete tasks and transactions have been significantly reduced. Training times have also been reduced.
- Employee job satisfaction – the mobile workforce are now empowered and the service staff in control of the customer experience
At Smart Telecom we are constantly striving to improve service excellence to the benefit of our customers and this partnership is enabling us to move forward. The process improvement systems and consultancy provided by Sword Ciboodle will enable Smart Telecom to further improve services as we continue our aggressive growth path in the Irish marketplace.