Customer Profile

From Complexity to Competitive Advantage Strategic Desktop is Key to Helping Leading Marketer Deal with Success and Customer Retention

f you are one of the fastest growing mobile phone and broadband providers in your market, ranked number one in customer satisfaction and in the top 10 Iplaces to work, what do you do next? You do what got you there in the fi rst place – focus on customer experience, employee effectiveness and employee morale.

Getting value delivered Telefónica O2 is the UK’s leading provider of mobile phones and broadband service and was recently ranked sixth in the Best 20 Big Companies to Work for quickly to the business was in the UK by The Sunday Times. Telefónica O2 UK now boasts 18.7 million Pay As “paramount to demonstrating You Go and Pay Monthly customers.

the value of a unifi ed As the business has grown, so have the costs to support it. Telefónica O2 UK has

desktop solution. The hired thousands of customer service advisors to support the growing customer base. And, to support the wide variety of product offerings and customer whole point of our strategic “ contracts, a multitude of information systems have been built or purchased, and desktop initiative is to bring deployed in the call centres. This has resulted in a complicated mosaic of screens, systems and tools on the advisors’ computer desktops. agility and fl exibility to our contact centre operations. In the Pay As You Go call centre in Bury, England, the 850 advisors struggled with the growing complexity of the numerous systems and processes. Certain call types, such as Data Settings (correcting issues with data services on the customer’s mobile device), became so complex that specialisation was required. Only 100 advisors were trained and equipped to handle these call types, causing customer calls to be transferred and resulting in cumbersome IVR menus and call routing.

To turn chaos into a competitive advantage, in 2006, Telefónica O2 UK established the Transformation Team and tasked it with some mighty objectives: improve operational effectiveness and continue to lead the market in customer service, while reducing the cost of operations. One of the key initiatives identifi ed by the team was the need for a strategic call centre desktop.

“This is one of those rare cases where both IT and business leaders recognised an urgent need and Benefi ts of a Unifi ed Customer began to address the matter as a Service Desktop: team,” said Gareth Turpin, Head of • Average handle times have Customer Service Transformation been reduced by 12% for Telefónica O2 UK. “The advisors and their managers were clear that • Data Settings now happen in the current desktop environment real-time; 30% of call backs was limiting their ability to drive have been eliminated an excellent customer experience, • Customer service advisors and IT recognised something new are more empowered and innovative was needed to take O2 to the next level. We needed • Customer experience has to enable our advisors to focus on improved our customers rather than on the • Migration to a virtualised systems on the desktop, improve our contact centre has begun success rate on process fulfi lment, and reduce the amount of after-call Customer Profi le work and duplicate keying our advisors initiative is to bring agility and fl exibility had to perform. In short, we needed to to our contact centre operations; we make the lives of our advisors easier.” could not wait 12 months or more to deliver results.” “Synergy”, Telefónica O2 UK’s new advisor desktop, was born. The fi rst release of Synergy was deployed in three months, and the Finding a Solution results are impressive. The team set out to evaluate third-party solutions that could simplify, automate Synergy Delivers and unify the customer service Synergy is a simplifi ed, automated desktop. Initially, 12 vendors were desktop that presents an intelligent evaluated, ranging from new CRM/ view of customer data and the types and don’t have to transfer the BPM-oriented applications to unifi ed processes required to support various customer. The success of the Pay As customer service desktop offerings. In call types in the Telefónica O2 UK You Go Synergy project has resulted the end, a unifi ed desktop solution was Pay As You Go call centre. It has in the company extending the Jacada selected as the preferred approach. signifi cantly improved advisor effi ciency unifi ed desktop solution to the Pay and effectiveness and improved the Monthly call centres. “A new CRM application would customer experience, too. have required signifi cant changes to “Virtualisation is an important initiative established business processes and Average handle times (AHT) across for us, which will have signifi cant data management tasks across the the Pay As You Go call centre are benefi ts for our customers and our enterprise,” said Susan O’Dea, IS down 43 seconds, representing a 12% advisors,” said Cheryl Black, Customer Major Programmes & Project Delivery reduction in time and costs, and an Service Director for Telefónica O2 UK. Manager for Telefónica O2 UK. “We improved interaction for the customer. “We want to provide our customers have over 20 business systems in the And by automating complex call types with a seamless experience, regardless call centre, all of which serve a purpose Telefónica O2 UK can now move to a of the products and services they in the enterprise but create havoc for virtualised contact centre environment. have. Synergy will enable any advisor our advisors. We needed a solution to support any customer and any that would be non-disruptive to the One of the most complex call types call type, which will simplify our enterprise and, at the same time, would is Data Settings – less than 20% of interactions with our customers and transform the way our advisors work.” the advisors were equipped to handle drive signifi cant cost savings for these calls. The provisioning system Telefónica O2. After signifi cant due diligence, used to reset data services on the Telefónica O2 UK selected Jacada. customer’s device was not accessible “Most importantly, we want our advisors Jacada® WorkSpace was chosen to the advisors, so any service to be able to focus on our customers as the unifi ed service desktop for changes were queued-up and batch and their needs, and not on the systems Synergy, and Jacada® Fusion provided processed, taking as long as 24 hours they have to use. We are very pleased an all-important integration capability to be implemented. This required a with our decision to partner with to satisfy the quick time-to-market scheduled call-back by the advisor to Jacada. Their innovative unifi ed desktop requirements of the project. insure that the changes were made solution will help Telefónica O2 achieve and that the customer was satisfi ed – our goal to be the most recognised “We have made a lot of progress typically a lengthy call with an average and respected brand in mobile and with our SOA initiatives, but not all handle time of 12 minutes. broadband services.” of our business applications have been service-enabled,” remarked With Synergy, Data Settings is now an O’Dea. “The non-invasive integration intuitive and automated call process, capabilities in Jacada Fusion provide integrated with the provisioning system a critical component that allowed us in real-time. Average handle times for to get Synergy rolled out quickly – we Data Settings calls have been reduced did not need to wait to have all the by 120 seconds. The customer’s data integration points fi gured out.” services are now fi xed during the fi rst call. Today, this eliminates approximately Because of the urgent business need, it 15,000 outbound call-backs a month was critical that Synergy be introduced (a reduction of 30%), which improves to the call centre quickly. The Jacada the customer experience and results 800-773-9574 (U.S.) technology made this possible and an in signifi cant savings. The savings +44 20 3178 4803 (UK) innovative implementation approach are expected to continue to grow as +31 878 756 883 (Benelux) made it happen. the automated procedure is rolled out +49 89 5908 2140 (Germany) +46 8 522 278 80 (Nordic) across the call centre. “The Jacada team proposed an agile development methodology for the Synergy will eliminate the need for www.jacada.com project,” said O’Dea. “Getting value specialised data advisors, which will delivered quickly to the business was drive tremendous economies of scale Jacada is a registered trademark paramount to demonstrating the value throughout the centre. The solution is of Jacada Inc. All other trademarks of a unifi ed desktop solution. The also expected to boost advisor morale are the property of their respective owners. doc. # 53.101.1108EU whole point of our strategic desktop as they can now handle more call