These economic times don’t just try men’s souls; they squeeze corporate spending. Today there are pressures on both capital and operational expense budgets for companies of all sizes. This is the time when leading-edge companies try out the few new technologies that save them money while enhancing their ability to forge better connections between their customers and customer care resources. Office Depot’s selection of Transera’s Seratel platform provides a case in point.

The decision comes after a long period of evaluation and trial deployments. The office supply company sells more than $15 billion (U.S.) to business customers around the world. It offers both sales and product support at its retail stores, through its e-commerce Web sites and over the phone. The company’s phone network routes calls domestically to its own call center as well as a network of home-based agents under contract to a third-party. In addition, Office Depot contracts with third-party service providers operating eight additional contact centers around the world.

Transera now provides Office Depot with a single centralized platform for intelligent routing, call management and reporting for phone-based customer interactions. This approach results in significant cost savings accompanied by measurable improvement in the key variables that indicate improved customer care, such as shorter wait times, fewer abandoned calls and higher success rates. As Kevin Buckley, who directs Office Depot’s North American Business Solutions Division, noted Seratel “improved the interaction experience of our customers while increasing operational efficiencies and internal productivity.”

The Power of the Global Queue
Improving customer care quality at lower costs results from the deployment of a fundamentally different call processing and customer care architecture. Under its old regime, Office Depot routed each incoming call according to a hard-coded allocation table. Each of its contact centers received a set percentage of calls regardless of queue length, agent availability or external factors (such as weather, earthquakes or power outages) that might impact that site’s performance.

Using this method, Office Depot overdosed on proportional routing. It often led to a multiplicity of long queues, insensitivity to agent “presence” and the inability to deliver calls to agents with special skill sets. Quality of care suffered while networking expenses sky-rocketed. Costs were driven higher when calls needed to be transferred from an agent in one location to another, more appropriate person who might be half way around the world. In those instances, carriers often charged on a per transaction basis for “take-back-and-transfer” or “transfer-connect” services.

In many cases, the old infrastructure only supported so-called blind transfer. As a result, callers may be forced to sit on hold waiting for the next available agent in another site. That agent, in turn, may have no information about the caller or the purpose of the call, which obviously adds to both call duration and customer frustration. From the point-of-view of call monitoring and management, such call transfers from the endpoints are a reporting nightmare. It is extremely difficult to track the customer experience through multiple legs of a single call.

Seratel supports a global queue. This enables Office Depot to perform call-by-call routing based on several criteria, including agent skills and “presence-based” availability. What’s more, that routing takes place in-the-cloud, meaning that multiple transfers can be accomplished without having to bear the special feature charges associated with transfer/connect events.

In addition, Seratel supports “screen pops” by employing SIP-based messaging rather than CTI-links. So when calls are transferred, the receiving agent’s computer screen can display information about the state of the incoming call, including caller identity along with call history and other metadata, such as the purpose of the call and other status indicators.

Reports Validate the Results
Because it resides at the routing layer, Seratel enables Office Depot to monitor activities across all of its existing network infrastructure and contact center resources, including those operated by outsourcers. The platform can provide reports and activity logs from all elements in the network. This unified view was not possible under the old system and has been instrumental in proving the financial value of the solution by illustrating cost savings and validating ROI assumptions.

Such practical implementations of software-as-a-service (SaaS), IP-telephony and contact center applications portends that more will come. Admittedly, it is a large company phenomenon, but hard economic times have a way of accelerating the move to lower cost technologies, especially those that have a positive impact on a company’s performance and its ability to better serve its customers.

Dan Miller is founder and senior analyst with Opus Research.

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