November 1998

Payroll Giant ADP Raises Customer Satisfaction With CTI-Enabled Call Center

BY BECKY SLIPE

When a one percent increase in customer satisfaction translated into a $450 million impact on top-line revenues, it captured the attention of ADP, a giant in the payroll, benefits administration, and human resource services industry. The company generates nearly $3 billion in revenues in its employer services division. To maintain competitive advantage, ADP strives to provide world-class client service, a daunting task for a company that handles more than 70 million calls each year.

OVERCOMING TECHNOLOGY HURDLES
ADP's internal goals are to respond to customer calls within 20 seconds or to call customers back within 20 minutes. However, there are a host of factors that challenge ADP's service personnel in meeting these goals. The company's aggressive growth and product introduction schedules result in increasing call volumes. At the same time, client expectations for service are rising.

It was particularly challenging for ADP to maintain and upgrade its high service level without a consolidated point of entry for client information. ADP maintains over 50 computer centers and 73 sales and service centers in the U.S. alone, with additional locations in Europe. The largest centers can receive more than 200,000 calls per month, and client information is maintained in several different databases and systems. These factors often meant that service reps were ill-equipped to manage calls routed throughout the company.

ADP also decided to switch to Windows NT from OS/2. Migrating the operating system simultaneously with updating the call center was an additional challenge, but ADP felt Windows NT provided a more robust, industry-standard platform that facilitated easier transactions and better supported future applications.

Training costs were also a concern. Traditionally, new associates performed two weeks of training before taking their first phone call - a significant issue when call volume increases by 40 percent during the company's year-end crunch. New service representatives often took over two years to become fully proficient.

ROLLING OUT A NEW CALL CENTER
ADP decided to purchase an integrated call center solution from Clarify rather than build one independently. "The deciding factor was the requirement for rapid deployment," says Helen Roberts, vice president of client service technology for employer services. "It usually takes nearly two years to roll out a new system like this. With Clarify, we cut that dramatically to just four months because it had so much available right out of the box."

With the help of Cambridge Technology Partners, ADP rolled out the system to more than 1,300 users in July 1997. Clarify will be on more than 6,000 workstations at the end of 1998.

MEETING ITS GOALS
ADP now provides its service representatives worldwide with a single point of entry for client inquiries, requests, and problem reporting. Cases are tracked and managed systematically to ensure none get lost. Today, 80 percent of customer questions are answered on the first call, up from 50 percent under the previous configuration.

Further, the new call center is engineered to reduce ADP's training costs by providing ease of use and access to solutions to previously logged problems. Since the update, ADP has realized significant improvements on its investments and has dramatically reduced its CSR training cycle. "Our service representatives are non-technical," says Roberts, "but they all remark on how easy the product is to use."

CTI-ENABLED CAPABILITIES IN USE TODAY
While many companies see cost savings as the goal, Doyle Minton, vice president of Call Center Development and Engineering at ADP, says that the driving force for CTI implementation at ADP is to increase customer satisfaction. With the help of Genesys, ADP is rolling out its CTI-enabled call center in phases. Currently it is using skills-based routing and providing separate local and 800 numbers for different groups of customers. Further, calls are routed to agents based on the customer's response to system prompts, segmenting calls based on the nature of the issue being addressed, the size of the customer's company, etc. The goal is for the agent with the right skill set to answer the call first, to resolve cases quickly.

Today, ADP uses Automatic Number Identification (ANI) to reduce call resolution time. When a call comes into the phone switch, the system captures the incoming phone number, matches it to the database, and the customer's profile automatically pops up on the agent's desktop. This allows agents to assist customers immediately, to handle issues within the terms of their service agreements, and to mount a variety of "up-selling" campaigns to maximize revenues.

While ANI works well in identifying consumers calling from home, a new hurdle arose in ADP's business-to-business relationships. Because business callers are dialing out through PBX systems that have multiple telephone lines, ADP was not receiving consistent ANIs to meet their 70 percent target for screen pops. Rather than using the voice response unit to prompt the caller for his/her phone number, ADP chose a unique approach. It has begun to cache the ANI so that the system will remember the various phone numbers associated with that particular customer. The next time the customer phones in, the system will have a higher ANI recognition rate.

FUTURE IMPLEMENTATIONS
By December, ADP expects to incorporate more intelligence into its call center by having the customer key in a PIN number, phone number, or other identifier that will integrate with the Genesys CTI server and the Clarify system to conduct more intelligent routing and eliminate multiple 800 numbers. Calls can then be routed by criteria ADP has in its database such as client size, type of service agreement, or the last agent contacted.

ADP also takes advantage of automatic outbound dialing features. This capability allows an agent to click on a phone number in the client's on-screen profile, automatically initiating a call so that the agent can follow up on customer concerns easily and quickly.

In order to reduce call volume, thereby reducing operating costs, ADP is providing customers with Web-based self-service via the Clarify solution. ADP is currently working with two major telecommunications companies on a pilot project to place a callback button on ADP's Web site.

ADP also plans to allow clients to submit cases, check the status of cases, access the ADP solutions knowledgebase, and make changes to their profile independently via the Web. For example, a client may simply want to change their company's payroll schedule process without speaking with an agent.

"Implementing the Clarify call center and incorporating CTI capabilities have been key to our service strategy and have allowed us to excel in customer satisfaction," concluded Roberts.

Becky Slipe is the senior product marketing manager of Call Center Solutions for Clarify, Inc. Clarify is a global leader in integrated front office solutions that unite companies and their partners around customers. Clarify is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, contact Clarify at 888-CLARIFY, via e-mail at info@clarify.com, or visit their Web site at www.clarify.com.