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April 1999


International Call Center Consolidation: A Real-Life Example

BY DAVE HANSON, NORTEL NETWORKS

Nortel Networks is a global company that markets products in approximately 150 countries and territories. To remain competitive and continue to increase our business, we must continually improve customer service. As service is being conducted more and more through the call center, our call center operations must be continually reevaluated and adapted.

I know we are not alone in facing this challenge, so Nortel has decided to share some of our success strategies that might benefit you, as well. The following is a description of how we analyzed one of our call center operations, planned and made significant changes to enable one call center to handle inquiries from 45 countries -- all within a tight timeframe and without disrupting existing activity.

Approximately two years ago, there were two Nortel Networks sales and marketing call centers in North America, each handling inquiries from end-user customers: Nortel Networks' distributors, wired and wireless telephone and data carriers, Internet service providers and utilities that frequently build their own private networks. The Saint John, New Brunswick center served Canada and the Dallas, Texas center supported the United States. At that time, we had no sales and marketing call center serving the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region. In other words, we had duplicate services within North America and no comparable service for the Caribbean and Latin American markets.

Realizing this, we initiated a business case analysis to consolidate the two existing call centers serving North America, with an eye on increasing efficiency and customer service while decreasing costs. Soon after, the president of our CALA organization petitioned us to implement measures that that would improve customer satisfaction in his region.

Separate Initiatives
Since these were two separate initiatives, I will discuss them individually, beginning with the North American consolidation.

Prior to the consolidation study, we had initiated a project to combine the two separate customer-contact databases from Saint John and Dallas. We also wanted to link the new database to a common online vendor fulfillment center for sales and marketing collateral.

The primary objectives of the business case analysis were to:

  • Determine if major cost savings could be realized through consolidation and,
  • Determine if the consolidation could be executed rapidly enough to impact fiscal-year costs, while maintaining or improving customer service levels.

We used one of the standard business case approaches of identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The main conclusions we drew were:

  • Saint John offered the greatest opportunity to cut costs,
  • Staff displacement in Dallas could be addressed by redeployment and,
  • We could deal with other weaknesses and threats associated with customer and employee impacts, such as training and issues associated with consolidating the distributor information and fulfillment databases.

Among the many actions formulated from the business case, two partnering relationships stand out as key success factors.

The first was with one of our corporate suppliers for contract staffing. Many of the positions created in Saint John were filled with internal candidates who had experience in either our help desk or outbound services departments within the call center. The new positions were more permanent and offered career advancements for some existing staff. But the movement of staff would have been devastating to the other call center departments if not for the availability of qualified candidates and our supplier's capability to recruit, screen, hire and train for the positions to be backfilled. The increase in the number of contract employees at Saint John, resulting from the consolidation, led the supplier to establish an onsite representative to assist contractors.

The second partner was a U.S. software development company that had previously developed a similar database for Nortel Networks and was highly recommended. We continue to have a relationship with the company for enhancements to the combined database and other projects.

Smooth Implementation In North America
In short, the North American consolidation has gone extremely well. The cutover to Saint John occurred less than five months from the start of our business case analysis.

Despite the quick project turnaround, operating cost savings were better than projected, and service levels have improved from preconsolidation because there is greater efficiency in having one queue instead of two. We operate from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and average 800 calls per day into the center, compared to approximately 600 before the consolidation. We could have achieved the same results by networking the two centers, but that would have cost more to implement, and managing two centers instead of one would have required additional effort and expense. As it is, annual costs have decreased by approximately 20 percent, or about $500,000. Because of the cost savings, we were able to add agents. We have 17 in the inbound operation. Prior to consolidation, we were well below our goal of answering 80 percent of calls within 20 seconds. We are now achieving that target.

We are also more effective, largely because of the consolidated databases and because having all calls entering only one queue makes them easier to manage. When we had two centers, we struggled to stay on top of the sales follow-up process. We must continually monitor this, but now we are reaching our goal of following up with each potential customer within three days of the initial call. This means we get the customer in touch with the right distributor and make sure the two have made contact.

Our effectiveness also shows in the abandoned call rate decrease from the double digits to below five percent. In addition, we are now answering calls in about 14 seconds, compared to at least 30 seconds before. This goes back to the efficiency of having one queue instead of two -- the more agents you have in one queue, the more evenly calls can be dispersed across the group and the more calls you can answer.

We have successfully implemented skills-based routing and a relational database. These changes assist our agents in providing better quality service to Nortel Networks' customers and prospects, thus making them more valuable to Nortel Networks. These tools enable agents to be more efficient and helpful to callers because they do not need to take as much time searching for information as before. For example, if a customer wants a piece of collateral material, the agent can place the order online right then and send it to the fulfillment house. Whenever the same customer calls back, the answering agent can pull up the customer records quickly. Prior to the integration, agents had to toggle back and forth between two systems.

CALA Implementation
Just as we were approaching the cutover date for the consolidation project, our CALA marketing team approached the call center with a request to provide toll-free service to that region. The request included establishing call center service for 45 countries -- offering both recorded message information and/or live agent assistance in three languages -- and a timeline calling for implementation in three months.

The objectives were to provide existing customers and potential new customers with easy access to a host of information concerning available services in their countries, such as:

  • The telephone number for the local Nortel Networks office in that country,
  • The names and numbers for distributors of Nortel Networks' products,
  • Information pertaining to Nortel Networks' products and application solutions and,
  • Telephone numbers to call for technical product support.

We began by asking ourselves some basic questions, such as:

  • Where should the center be located?
  • Is toll-free service available for all the countries we wanted to serve?
  • What should the hours of operation be?
  • What unique skills might our agents require?

The first question was probably the most difficult. We were on the verge of consolidating our call center service for North America into Saint John, but Saint John is a long way from Miami (CALA headquarters) and even further from the countries we were to serve. However, the necessary infrastructure was in place at Saint John. So, for many of the reasons we chose Saint John for consolidation, it made sense to have it also serve CALA.

Obviously, there were some challenges. For one thing, toll-free service was not available in all the countries we wanted to serve. Another was providing Spanish- and Portuguese-language services. This was not a trivial issue for Saint John, a city of fewer than 150,000 people. Spanish was not as big a challenge, since we already had Spanish-speaking agents in our center who occasionally handled calls from the United States in Spanish, but Portuguese presented a problem. However, since Portuguese was required only for Brazil and the expected volume of calls that required agent intervention was relatively small, we selected an outside translation service with experience in this area.

Portuguese-speaking customers dial our toll-free number and hear menu selections in Portuguese. If the menus do not have the information the caller wants, he or she can choose to speak to an agent. Agents answering these calls are trained to greet the customers and request that they hold for Portuguese-speaking agents. The agents then establish three-way calls with agents at the translation service. The Nortel Networks agents remain on the calls in case the translation service agents cannot fully address the requests. Although this is not as efficient as having our own Portuguese-speaking agents, it is a flexible, cost-effective solution that so far seems to be acceptable to customers. As the requirement for more Portuguese calls changes and other language requirements develop, we will review our process.

Also, we concluded that we could not have the complete region operational within the requested three-month timeframe, so we worked with the CALA marketing team to establish a two-phase implementation.

Twenty-three of the 25 countries identified for Phase One required English-language service; the other two required Spanish. Only five countries did not have toll-free service. In these countries, we decided to offer collect-call service. Because a collect call requires routing to a long-distance operator, it is not as convenient to the callers, but it accomplishes the desired goal of eliminating the need for the caller to pay for the call. Phase Two addressed implementation for the remaining 20 countries, which were predominantly Spanish-speaking. Few had toll-free service to North America, so we again implemented collect-call service.

Routing
There are three routes for calls. The choice of carrier for each country depends on availability, setup time and cost (not necessarily in that order). The majority of calls are routed over the public network via international carrier and then through our local telephone service provider, NBTel. NBTel assisted greatly in setting up the toll-free service numbers by working closely with Stentor, which in turn worked with the Caribbean and Latin America countries that assigned the toll-free numbers for their respective countries.

We discovered late in the process that MCI could not terminate our toll-free numbers directly into Canada. Therefore, the calls were routed to our CALA office at Sunrise, Florida and connected to Saint John over our corporate private network. AT&T serves the other countries, calls from which go directly to Saint John. This process is not apparent to the callers.

Each country is assigned a default language and each has its own line and script. A caller from any of the toll-free countries will automatically be placed into a menu script in the default language for his or her country. However, the first option in each script is to switch to one of the other languages. Selecting one of these alternatives will roll the call over to the appropriate script. Non-toll-free callers dial into a fourth line that is routed directly to one of our agents. The customer can either access various prerecorded information or speak to an agent.

We completed both implementation phases in CALA just four months after planning commenced. Since then, we have fully integrated the CALA product collateral with our North American fulfillment process. Before, we had three distinct territories, two call centers and no service to the Caribbean/Latin America region. Today, we offer common service for all customers in these regions -- all from the Saint John call center.

Learning Process
This is not the end of the story, however. Planning and implementation are just two of the pillars of any successful project. It is also very important to review what you learned during the project and continually review the operation.

Right now, for example, we are not receiving as many calls from CALA as we would like, and we should do a better job of advertising our service in that region. CALA's rate of usage could be greatly expanded.

Another area of focus is the e-mail inquiries we are receiving via the Nortel Networks' Web page. They have more than doubled recently to an average of 180 per day, and we need to implement greater efficiency in getting them into the database. Currently, we re-key the e-mail messages into the database. We are now considering consolidating our voice and e-mail operations, but we know this will involve training to ensure that the agents possess the skills to effectively handle both types of inquiries.

Also, as our corporate Web site evolves, there is an opportunity to move toward a virtual call center on a global basis. This could involve capabilities such as text translation: for example, a customer could send a message in German and the system would translate the note into English for the agent. The agent's reply then would automatically be translated from English to German.

Right now, these may seem like pie-in-the-sky scenarios, but they will eventually become reality. Constant planning, review and willingness to change are necessary to prepare for the future of our business.

Dave Hanson is responsible for the planning and operation of Nortel Networks' customer-contact center serving North America and the Caribbean and Latin American countries.







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