The customer care team at TDC supports a wide range of telecommunications products within Internet connections, telephony and TV. In the first case study, TDC realised solid improvements in average handling time, customer satisfaction and quality of escalated cases. However, the overall performance of the call centre still wasn’t what they were after. They actually saw degraded performance in some areas as a result of using the Microsoft Customer Care Framework that acted as an “umbrella” for all the call centre applications.
TDC reduced training time by 75%
A dedicated effort to build a unified agent application providing a simple and intuitive user interface powered by Dezide technology-led TDC to greatly reduced training time and improved average handling time and customer satisfaction.
75%
Reduced Training Time
27%
Increase in First Time Right
43%
Reduction in unacceptable fault-handling experience
About TDC
TDC is the leading Danish provider of communication solutions within Internet connections, telephony and TV with market leadership across all segments of the domestic market.
In other Nordic countries, TDC is the main challenger in the business market.
TDC employs more than 9.000 people and is located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Complex IT Landscape Was Hurting Call Centre Performance
Microsoft CCF wasn’t the great success in the call centre as TDC expected. CCF gathered some 59 systems in one central user interface, but it was still 59 systems with each its own tab. This was typical call centre systems like CRM systems (4 different in total), telephone number systems, call forwarding systems and much more. It was an effort to merge this rather complex IT landscape into something more manageable for the agents and from that perspective, the CCF was successful. However, from a usability and performance perspective, the CCF failed tremendously. Even though the agents no longer didn’t have to switch between individual apps, it was still a confusing interface that relied heavily on each user’s experience with each individual system and it still imposed heavy training times on employees. Integration between the systems was limited, data flow was difficult and the system was hard to maintain.
Even the agent computers were struggling to keep up with the system which required a lot of computer power to run all those systems at the same time in the same framework, and this was hurting performance too as agents spent too much time waiting for the computer.
The decision was made to start working on a replacement for the CCF …
We see Dezide as an essential strategic element that translates very complicated business rules into easy-to-follow operating procedures
Program Manager, TDC
The Dream Of One Simple Interface For Agents
The dream was one simple easy to use interface for call centre agents that would display only the information that the agents need at any given time when the agents are on the phone with customers.
The system should be able to automatically collect and evaluate complex line measurement data. This was already achieved in the old system using the Dezide Data Collection IoT framework which had prompted a huge boost in productivity and a significant reduction of average handling time, so TDC wanted to make sure this was carried over to the new system.
Another focus point was to be able to present various tools that the agent needs depending on the context and nature of the call. If the call revolves around a problem that the customer has with his e-mail, the system should present a small “widget” in the side of the screen containing the tools necessary to e.g. reset the customers e-mail password straight from the current user interface without the agent having to go to another IT system, look up the customer, find his e-mail subscription, bring up the controls and reset the password – it should all happen automatically using a few simple buttons that are presented at just the right time, and only at the right time.
A thorough investigation of IT solutions that would support TDC’s requirements revealed that nothing really existed that would allow them to obtain the level of simplicity and automation that they were after, so they decided to build their own solution.
As Dezide was already proven to provide excellent results in the call centre, it was decided to base the new system on the Dezide Web Service API. Dezide would become the Information Broker back-bone of the system responsible for determining what data the agent needs at any given time and making sure the right tools shows up when needed.
Service Enabling The Call Centre IT Landscape
The MS CCF integration was built in 2011 at a time when API’s weren’t the norm for connecting systems. In this pre-API era system integration work was much more difficult and the resulting solutions more fragile and prone to downtime upon software updates.
As such, it was a big undertaking to service enable all of the systems that the agents usually interact with through the user interface and make the functionality available for web service integration purposes. Some systems wouldn’t lend themselves to become web service enabled, so simple database views would do the job for some of the legacy systems.
The new system was called the “Customer Interaction Portal” (CIP) and it connected all the back-end systems including the case management system, the Dezide system and the CMS to a Service Bus middle layer component that client apps communicate with through Web Service calls. Dezide sits right in the middle controlling the menus, the troubleshooting logic and agent tools, and the content is loaded at runtime from the CMS system.
CIP is the one unified application for Service Desk agents abstracting away around 50 back-end systems that the team dreamed of when they embarked on the journey to build a better call centre.
The Customer Interaction Portal was built primarily for the Customer Service Representatives, but today the usage has extended to the field service engineers (FSE) too. The FSE’s use the same application, but the troubleshooting guides are different and the tools widgets presented are different too.
TDC Transitions From Clutter To One Unified App Resulting in Reduced Training Time
Dezide has grown from delivering impressive results in technical troubleshooting while integrated into in Microsoft CCF to being one of the 10 most important applications in the IT landscape at TDC.
Today Dezide is one of the IT systems with the highest strategic impact for many years, and the usage continues to increase. The unified agent interface reduces handling and training time significantly – training time required for new agents has been reduced from 8 to 2 weeks, the support process has been streamlined and ultimately customer satisfaction has increased significantly.
Changes to standard operating procedures – how the customer service team wants the agents to handle certain situations are rolled out very fast to the entire workforce without any training. It all happens in the background.
It’s truly one of the best integrations of Dezide technology that we have seen so far. Thanks to some very visionary leaders who has worked strategically with digitalisation, the call centre is now among the best.
With Dezide we can automatically collect data about the customer’s broadband connection and analyses the data much faster and frequently with greater quality than the CSR is able to
Program Manager, TDC
Extending usage from technical support to customer care
TDC is now broadening the usage of CIP from technical support agents and field service technicians to customer care where customers reach out for help with questions to billing, sales, subscription updates, service information and help with using media services like music, movies and so on. In these cases, the CIP will use Dezide Data Collection to obtain information about the customers subscriptions, purchased products and much more, presenting the necessary information and tools that the agent needs at just the right time, making sure that the customers gets the best possible experience when talking to a representative.
