ThinkPalm devised a Call Center Management System for a real estate developer based in Tokyo, Japan for enhanced employee efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction. ThinkPalm’s technical team worked on-site and left no stone unturned in assessing the capability of the end customer’s existing legacy application to develop a more effective call center management software. The call center software leverages our expertise in designing and implementing performance driven, enterprise-wide data intensive solutions as well as integrating such solutions with third party PBX devices.
Business Need
The end customer’s legacy call center management system encountered numerous shortcomings, which were degrading the overall operational efficiency and productivity. The ineptness to avoid data redundancy led the call center executives to contact the same customers multiple times, resulting in customer agitation. The system also suffered from significant latency during the extraction of name lists, performed solely during non-business hours. The execution of campaigns crossed deadlines and budgets overran, culminating in increased overheads and business loss. Due to the lack of an effective system in place to supervise and control call prohibition by managers, executives often ended up calling key customers at undesirable hours, a scenario least desired in real estate sales.
Expectations From The System
The client required an integrated call center scheduling software to streamline all facets of call center management such as outbound call handling, call data manipulation, work flow, user settings, name list extraction, removing customer data redundancy, prospecting, call prohibition, induced prohibitions, assignment of work to executives, monitoring and status reporting. The system had to directly interface with a PBX device to handle calls selected by the call center executive. The prioritization of tasks was expected to help the marketers reach out and interact with key prospects, facilitating the establishment of good customer relations. The solution had to possess the capability to automate the day-to-day activities of executives to mitigate operational complexities and improve efficiency.
Challenges
From a technology standpoint, the non-availability of a PBX device at the offshore center posed difficulties in establishing a test environment to test the functionalities of the PBX device such as call forwarding and parking. The availability of just one CAL license for a system to connect with the SQL server was a major challenge, which was tackled using service-oriented architecture. The team worked carefully on the integration of the APIs of the PBX system with the ThinkPalm software. Data migration was tricky, as just tabular designs were made available due to data security issues.
ThinkPalm Call Center Management System
The solution encompassed three important facets of call center management:
Name List Management: Name list feature automates various processes such as placing orders for name lists to vendors, importing purchased name lists, extracting customers from name lists and defining the extracted name lists, collating and grouping customers, assigning customers to call center executives and applying inducement breaks against customers.
Call Management: Call Management comprises activities related to contacting the customer. Standard Prospect, as part of this feature, allows adding new standard prospects, wherein the prohibition type can be defined. During an outbound call, the system allows the executive to enter the status of the call as a standard prospect, add memos and move key customers to a prospect box. Prospect Box enables easy grouping of customers to prioritize and contact on a regular basis.
Employee Management: The feature allows defining hierarchy in the company as Groups, Departments and Divisions along with assigning defined titles or roles to employees.The solution, thus, helps in the management of customer related calls along with the associated information and settings. CCMS caters to three types of users namely call center executives, supervisors and managers who use the different functionalities of the system.
Benefits
The solution worked remarkably for the company by establishing a well-defined work flow for the call center executives and easing supervision by managers. The marketers could make or attend calls at their convenience with “Toolbar”, place customers in queue, reassign when busy, and categorize them into prospect boxes based on feedback. The enhanced attention and time spent on highly likely customers resulted in improved conversions and customer satisfaction. Call prohibition ensured none of the customers where contacted at undesirable hours. Efficient resource management and monitoring turned out to be a piece of cake for the top management through the employee management module.
