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Scenario One: Summit Technologies Deploys Manage Inbound Service Call

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In this scenario, Summit Technologies decides to apply the Value-Based Service Coverage best practice by adopting the Manage Inbound Service Call business process supported by Siebel software, within a new implementation of Siebel applications. This scenario is an example of a straightforward adoption of a Siebel business process, with no customization.

Figure 7 shows the business process diagram for the Manage Inbound Service Call business process.

NOTE:  The business process modeled in Figure 7 is a simplified version of the actual Manage Inbound Service Call business process. The actual business process includes more steps.

Figure 7.  Manage Inbound Service Call Business Process

In rolling out the Manage Inbound Service Call business process, Summit Technologies first determines the business goal for its Siebel implementation. Then Summit figures out exactly what is needed to address this business goal and reviews Siebel business processes to determine their fit with the company's requirements. Next the company decides how to implement the business process solution. After that, Summit configures, validates, and deploys Siebel software to support this business process solution.

Company Profile

Summit Technologies produces test and measurement devices, semiconductor products, and chemical analysis tools for communications equipment manufacturers and biopharmaceutical companies in more than 120 countries. Headquartered in California, Summit Technologies has 41,000 employees in over 40 countries. The company had revenues of $8.4 billion in fiscal year 2001.

Summit's customer service operations include three inbound call centers as well as an email-fax response team that collaborates with the call center staff. Each of the three call centers has a different toll-free telephone number, and each center receives calls specific to its area of expertise. One call center provides general customer service, another offers technical support, and the third helps customers with their application support requests.

One of Summit's business goals is to minimize service costs while maximizing the level of service provided to customers. The test and measurement market, in which Summit Technologies operates, has seen intense competition in the last several years. Customers are demanding deeper discounts, higher levels of service and ease of doing business, as well as the latest technology and sound technical support.

The company is faced with the problem of beating out its competitors to retain its position as market leader, while keeping costs down and providing top-quality service to hold on to its customers. Summit meets its business goals by improving the operations of the company's call centers through the deployment of a new implementation of Siebel applications.

Define

Defining Implementation Goals. Summit Technologies' current business priority is to service its customers better than any of its competitors. Before settling on this priority, a group of company vice presidents and directors forms as an executive team to consider the problem areas affecting their business, and they clearly define each problem area with quantifiable metrics. After gauging the importance of each problem area, the Summit executive team realizes that poor customer satisfaction is the most important and controllable reason for declining revenues. When customers are unhappy with the service they are getting, they take their business elsewhere. In this way, the executives decide that customer defection is their main problem to focus on.

The vice president of customer service tells the other team members that unless they can find better, faster, and cheaper ways of doing things, they will continue to lose customers. She also reports that call center agents have up to eight systems open at any given time. The IT director informs the group that since the agents are forced to reference multiple systems, they do not always have consistent information. The IT director adds that most of the current systems do not offer the flexibility that the call center needs.

In considering their business challenges, the executive team comes to the conclusion that the problem of customer defection can be addressed by:

Improving coordination between the various departments within Summit to make interaction with the customer more efficient and effective
Improving the way in which service requests are resolved by using an automated process that eliminates the errors, inefficiency, and poor productivity of the current manual process
Employing standardized tools for problem diagnosis and automation of error-prone aspects of service delivery, such as call routing, entitlement verification, and escalations
Replacing inefficient legacy systems and fragmented business processes with a streamlined approach to the business
Achieving a real-time view into key performance indicators, such as quantifiable metrics about customer defections

The Summit executive team determines that in order to meet these goals, they will focus on improving the operations of the call center in their implementation planning. They will use the metrics they identified for the problem of customer defection in order to establish a benchmark from which to measure progress. Now that they have defined Summit's implementation goals, they call in their business analyst to continue with analyzing call center operations.Discover

Discovering Business Requirements. The business analyst reviews the business process diagrams provided in Siebel Cross-Industry Business Process Reference in order to determine which Siebel solutions address the implementation goals for improving call center operations to reduce customer defection. In the Service Business Processes section, he finds the business process diagram and reference pages for the Manage Inbound Service Call business process. This business process seems to address Summit's implementation goals.

The Manage Inbound Service Call business process includes the following best practices that can be applied to Summit's customer defection problem:

Dynamic, Data-Driven Call Resolution
Intelligent Issue Recognition and Routing
Multidimensional Service Opportunities Analysis
Implement Rules and Guidelines for Workflow
Value-Based Service Coverage

This scenario will limit its focus to the Value-Based Service Coverage best practice.

The business analyst now needs to involve other individuals from functional groups within Summit, to make sure that the Manage Inbound Service Call business process can be implemented in a way that meets the implementation goals. He needs to discover the specific business requirements for deploying this business process within the company's call center operations.

The business analyst identifies individuals to comprise a representative sample of all the functions carried out in Summit's call center operations. The representative sample includes call center agents, call center managers, IT staff, and anyone else who can provide information about the call center business processes currently in use. Meeting one-on-one with each of these individuals, he interviews them to get answers to a number of questions, including the following:

What are the key activities of each of the three call centers?
Who calls into the call centers?
Do callers join separate queues?
Do you distinguish between fee-based and free callers?
What activities do agents perform?
What are the specific steps in the process for receiving a call and for handling a call?
When do hand-offs occur?
Which activities are manual, and which are automated?
When is data from other systems accessed?

Now the business analyst forms an implementation planning team drawing from all the functional groups within Summit that will be affected by changes to call center operations. From within the company, he assembles a call center manager from each of the three call center facilities, a call center agent, and an IT manager. The business analyst acts as project manager for this implementation planning team, and as a facilitator for the team's discussions.

The implementation planning team conducts a business requirements workshop to capture and record call center business requirements for the new business process. The business analyst demonstrates the Manage Inbound Service Call business process for the team, and the team reviews the way it works, step by step. The team records Summit's detailed requirements for each step in the flow. The team agrees that the Manage Inbound Service Call business process should fit Summit's business requirements, through a discussion of the ways in which each call center currently handles calls.

During this discussion, the business analyst summarizes Summit's current business process for managing inbound service calls, and the implementation planning team briefly reviews its flow:

A customer calls into one of the three Summit call centers and is routed to a queue specific to the call center.
An available agent receives the call, greets the customer, and gathers identification information.
The agent accesses multiple systems to obtain the customer's profile, transaction history, and other information.
The agent guesses the value of the customer based on a history containing the last three months.
The agent listens while the customer explains the problem, then takes one of the following actions:
The agent accesses information to resolve the problem.
The agent transfers the call to someone else who can help, such as another agent or an expert in another department.
Next, the agent puts the customer on hold to research a solution.
The agent then talks to the customer again, either to explain the solution and wrap up the call, or, if the agent cannot resolve the issue while the customer is holding, to make arrangements for another call with the customer at a later time.

During times when the agents are not on calls with customers, they perform administrative tasks or remain idle awaiting calls.

The most important findings the business analyst makes in his review of the current business process are:

All call-center activities are performed manually, which has led to avoidable errors, inconsistency in the customer experience, and unnecessary costs because manual processes require more time and effort.
Neither active nor idle call-agent time is tracked systematically, so call center reports may be inaccurate and unreliable.

By considering the call center's existing business process for handling inbound service calls, the implementation planning team determines that:

There is no resource pooling across the three call centers, so some agents remain idle while customers wait on hold.
Customers join multiple call queues, on a first-come first-served basis.
There is no queue prioritization, so there is no way to give high-value customers better service or less waiting time.

The implementation planning team determines that the Manage Inbound Service Call business process will meet their business requirements, and that Summit can deploy the business process as-is, with no modifications necessary.

The new call center operations will now take the following steps:

NOTE:  The parts of the business process steps in italics replace ineffective parts of Summit's former business process.

A customer calls into one of the three Summit call centers and is routed to a queue from which all three call centers draw calls for available agents.
An available agent receives the call, greets the customer, and gathers identification information.
The agent accesses one source, the Siebel application, to obtain the customer's profile, transaction history, and other information.
The agent uses the Siebel application to score the customer.
The agent uses the Siebel application to assess the customer's value.
The agent listens while the customer explains the problem.
If the customer is considering dropping the service, the agent concentrates on managing customer retention.
Then the agent accesses information to resolve the problem, or transfers the call to someone else who can help, such as another agent or an expert in another department
Next, the agent puts the customer on hold to research a solution.

The agent then talks to the customer again, either to explain the solution and wrap up the call, or, if the agent cannot resolve the issue while the customer is holding, to make arrangements for another call with the customer at a later time.

Design

Designing the Business Solution. The Summit implementation planning team next creates an action plan for deploying the Siebel business process for handling inbound service calls. Focusing on the Value-Based Service Coverage best practice, they first discuss and come to agreement on the relevant metrics to score customer value, based on lifetime value and loyalty scores. They plan to implement technology that will provide an accurate view of customer value based on real-time predictive analytic measures and data-driven rules. This technology must also allow for real-time in-queue reprioritization to minimize hold times for high-value customers.

The team applies the Manage Inbound Service Call business process to replace Summit's current business process for managing inbound service calls, using Siebel software to support the new business process.

Configure

Configuring the Siebel Implementation. Under the monitoring of the business analyst, a technical team uses Siebel Tools to configure the Siebel application as-is, without performing any additional customization other than user-interface preferences. Meanwhile, a training manager from Summit coordinates with the technical team and monitors progress on the new implementation's Siebel Tools user-interface configurations to create a training session for the system's users on the new functionality and the enhanced business process for handling service calls.

Validate

Testing the Siebel Implementation. The technical team runs tests on the Siebel implementation before it goes live, making sure the entire process works as planned from beginning to end. The implementation planning team evaluates and approves a pilot implementation.

Deploy

Deploying the Siebel Implementation. Now Summit's Siebel implementation is ready for deployment, so the technical team moves the installation from the development environment to the production environment, and the implementation planning team, the users, the technical team, and the trainer collaborate to deploy the solution.

Implementation Results

Summit Technologies has identified a problem, decided to address it by implementing a Siebel business process solution, and chosen Siebel applications as the supporting software. The company has implemented the Manage Inbound Service Call business process to solve the problem of customer defection by improving the customer service it provides in its call centers.

Summit finds that the automation of call-center tasks provided with the Siebel application—in addition to the consolidation of eight legacy systems into a single, stable application—reduces call handling times by an average of 40%, because less time is required for accessing information. Not only that, but the pooling of available agents from all three call centers reduces customer wait times by an average of 23%. This improved efficiency boosts customer satisfaction scores by 17%, while simultaneously increasing the agent utilization rate from 63% to 77% by making more work possible by fewer agents.

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