Client: Global Chemical Company Challenge: As the chemical industry faces flat demand and increasing cost pressures, one chemical company sought improved ideas to leverage SAP's CRM functionality and consolidate its call centers to optimize its customer service operation. Solution: A joint CSC-client team collaborated through each of the respective discovery and design phases of work and delivered an HPCC Roadmap, Technology & Operational Plan to consolidate 14 centers into One Virtual Call Center and seven physical centers throughout North America. CSC also played a key role in implementation and implemented an organization change strategy that transformed the customer service organization. Results: Order accuracy has improved, while the average number of orders per representative has increased. Despite an increase in orders, order-processing time has remained the same, while follow-up order closure has been significantly reduced. By significantly improving customer service, the chemical firm expects to enjoy higher revenues, while significantly reducing call-center operating costs. About CSC's High Performance Contact Center (HPCC) Read more about CSC's High Performance Contact Center (HPCC) solution. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.

CSC's chemical company client has operations in nearly 40 countries. Servicing a diverse mix of clients – and providing each with detailed product information, such as precise costs and order and delivery status – proved to be a challenge.

To improve customer service, the firm began on a call-center consolidation initiative to integrate operations across its enterprise. Its customer service representatives were located across 14 North American call centers that were not integrated with the others. As a result, disparate call-center processes and redundant resources added to its operating costs, while making it difficult for representatives to service customers.

When clients had questions pertaining to pricing, product availability or delivery status, representatives needed to access multiple systems and screens to locate the information. Even after toggling through the myriad of screens, it was still difficult to close a call completely. This caused representatives to devote considerable time researching information and calling back customers.

To complicate matters, the chemical firm still relied, in part, on the knowledge of individual representatives to resolve customer issues. Their current systems did not effectively and efficiently capture customer-specific information during customer phone calls that could then be shared across the different centers.

To identify opportunities to drive cost reduction while improving customer service, the CSC-client team assessed all call-center processes and procedures and identified potential high-leverage opportunities to consolidate, streamline and standardize work processes. The team leveraged High Performance Contact Center (HPCC) best practices to develop new performance standards and metrics.

Leveraging High Performance Contact Center Best Practices
CSC’s team included resources from its HPCC operation, as well as members from its SAP and Organizational Change practices. After assessing the chemical company's operations, the CSC-client team identified a number of improvements that would enable enterprise-wide efficiencies in customer service.

Using CSC’s HPCC experience and methodology, the team was able to create a pilot system, which was used as a benchmark to assess the other business units. As a result, the team was able to identify and prepare well documented business case justification to a future state vision, enabling process and capability enhancements that gained the necessary alignment and support of key stakeholders across the enterprise

Consolidation and Centralization – The team centralized 14 formerly independent call center operations into one, virtual-integrated operation with seven locations. This approach enables all customer service representatives, regardless of location, to achieve functional excellence in servicing customers.

Knowledge Repository – The team interviewed key chemical company business users to capture client knowledge and show them how to maintain a knowledge repository. With the anticipated release of SAP/SAF, which CSC helped the chemical firm implement, all customer service representatives now have access to detailed information to assist every chemical firm client.

Process Restructuring – The team developed new standardized processes around customer segmentation. The team then aligned the customer-servicing template to the sales-and-marketing customer profile. As a result, customers, who are organized into different tiers and groups, based on their size and needs, are now serviced with the appropriate level of customer care. The chemical company's best customers, for instance, are automatically routed to senior-level representatives. The HPCC solution also uses technology that allows representatives to quickly access the information at the client's request. Representatives no longer need to toggle through numerous screens and are able to quickly access key customer profiling data.

Self-Care Web Technology – In today’s 24x7 world, many clients prefer to place orders or solicit information using e-mail or the Internet. A self-care solution allowed the chemical firm to "push" certain "lower-profile" client segments to its self-service portal, freeing up customer service representatives to provide more personalized service to their higher-profile clients.

Organizational Change Strategy – CSC also developed and implemented a comprehensive organizational change strategy to train customer service representatives in the processes and procedures of the new virtual call center.

Driving Customer Retention and Revenue, While Reducing Costs
Because representatives more quickly and accurately process and resolve customer issues, the following improvements have been realized:

• The average number of "orders-per-representative-per-day" has increased
  
• Despite the increase in orders per representative, the on-call order handling time has remained the same, while the off-call order-closure time has been significantly reduced
  
• The cost per order has dropped for their most efficient call center operation
  
• Convenient customer self-servicing, thanks to a Web-based customer portal, has significantly increased across all business units