Unified Communications
Food distributor boosts business with unified approach
JJ Foods found a solution that could streamline call handling, automate transaction workflows and combine tools and applications.
Today’s contact center desktops can be a confusing hodge-podge of diverse applications that make getting a complete view of customer, support or product information a challenge. Contact center agents often contend with multiple, often overlapping applications (e.g., ACD, CRM), order-entry systems, knowledge-management systems, scripting systems, e-mail, instant messaging and schedules. Supervisors also deal with quality-management (QM) and workforce-management (WFM) systems, performance management and reporting systems. Juggling these multiple applications not only takes a toll on efficiency, it can impede customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and revenue growth.
A toolset that integrates applications, eliminates overlap, incorporates real-time services and presents all systems and tools through a unified desktop environment can alleviate these concerns. With a unified desktop in place, agents and supervisors can be equipped to achieve first call resolution, identifying and acting on sales opportunities and driving customer loyalty.
JJ Food Service, a food distribution company based in Middlesex, United Kingdom, serves more than 20,000 customers, and processes 80 percent of its orders through its 70-person contact center. With peak hourly sales approaching $250,000, efficiency and convenience are critical to the order process. The problem, however, was that JJ Foods’ contact center agents and supervisors relied on multiple desktop applications to help process orders.
JJ’s goal was to streamline the call process for order handling, minimize the number of applications and provide a single view of the customer. The company evaluated five contact center solutions, finally preferring a solution that would enable them to keep IT functions in-house.
“To differentiate our services, we needed a solution that would help us foster one-to-one relationships with our customers, agents and delivery drivers,” says Rif Kiamil, IT manager for JJ. “We needed flexible, precise routing, following standards that we can easily support without complex and costly integration.”
JJ Foods selected Cisco Agent Desktop and Cisco Supervisor Desktop applications to streamline call handling, automate transaction workflows, enable team collaboration, and unify other tools and applications in a single desktop. The solution, implemented by managed services provider Calabrio, eliminates keystrokes and minimizes the number of applications an agent must touch to complete a transaction.
The solution tightly connects call processing with a unified Web services application. First, JJ Foods leverages its Cisco Unified Contact Center Express ACD to identify the customer based on the phone number. This phone number is used to access customer data within Microsoft Dynamics AX, and routes the call to the appropriate agent, based on language, previous relationships or other predetermined criteria.
The integrated desktop presents this customer data to the agent when the call is answered, including the customer’s preferred language (most agents speak two) and the customer’s call history for the day. If required, agents can view previous call history through integration with an enterprise resource-planning system. If a phone number is not known, the agent uses Web services integration to identify the caller based on other information, such as an account number.
“Because customer service is what differentiates our business, JJ pays close attention to contact center statistics, such as the number of calls answered, average call time and sales,” says Kiamil. “We were using an existing key performance indicator system visible on our company intranet, which we decided to keep, and integration through Cisco Agent Desktop and Cisco Supervisor Desktop was simple to achieve through Web services. Now agents and supervisors can monitor their own performance or their team’s performance in real time, with up-to-the-minute, accurate metrics right on their desktops.”
For additional resilience, JJ Food Service uses Cisco IP Phone Agent as a backup for agent PCs. Phone Agent displays text and graphics on the display of the phone, helping agents log in and out, record call outcomes, and see the queue length and hold time. “If the power is cut, our agents’ PCs shut down, but because our phones are powered by an uninterruptible power supply, they remain on and agents can use Cisco IP Phone Agent,” says Kiamil.
JJ Foods has been able to simplify all contact center desktops to enable more efficient and informed customer service, and streamline agent call handling. By enhancing the routing capabilities of the contact center, JJ Foods was able to eliminate hundreds of thousands of transferred calls and callbacks each year.
The integrated desktop enforces best practices by automating transaction workflows. As a result, staff has been able to reduce call handling times by eliminating keystrokes and minimizing the number of applications an agent must touch to complete a transaction. Integration with the company’s key performance indicator system helps agents and supervisors track and monitor individual and team performance in line with larger company goals.
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