SITEL Builds Reporting Portal With WebFOCUS

Snapshot

Organization SITEL Corporation designs, implements, and operates multichannel contact centers that support major multinational companies. The Central European operation, hosted in Brussels, Belgium, manages clients in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany.

The Challenge Create accurate management reports that summarize the activity related to each customer contact center.

The Strategy Design and implement a business intelligence portal that uses WebFOCUS to combine statistical information from multiple information systems.

The Results The SITEL Reporting Portal improves visibility into each client's contact center business, making it an essential tool for maintaining customer satisfaction and quality service levels.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS

Market-leading companies continually strive to include customers in their value chains, ensuring a competitive advantage and increasing profits. The challenge comes with serving each customer uniquely and being able to respond effectively to customer needs. Many companies turn to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for assistance – comprehensive software systems that help companies identify their profitable customers and deliver exceptional service.

SITEL Corporation has created a unique market niche by helping companies develop effective strategies for contact center management using CRM software. The company designs, implements, and operates multichannel contact centers that support the CRM strategies of leading multinational companies. These dedicated "cosourced" call centers answer calls and e-mail messages while providing Internet service through interactive and voice-based technologies.

With 300 multinational clients, SITEL has built a business of more than 22,000 people manning 72 customer contact centers in 20 countries. Information Builders' WebFOCUS is an important part of SITEL's contact center solutions, helping managers provide a single portal for combining information from multiple software applications and data sources. "Without WebFOCUS, it would be impossible to combine data into a cohesive set of reports for SITEL's Central European Reporting System," says Tom Peeters, SITEL's reporting and data services team leader.

SITEL employees generate 300 types of reports through the portal. WebFOCUS streamlines access to dissimilar data sources and dynamically generates reports in a variety of output formats, such as HTML for display in Web browsers. Users like being able to drill down to obtain different management views. Typical call center statistics include call arrivals, how fast calls are answered, and through which agent calls are routed. For example, a manager might want to know the number of outbound calls, whether they were effective, and who was the sales supervisor for the customer.

Improving Operations for Customers

On an average day, the contact center in Belgium receives about 135,000 calls and several thousand e-mail messages on behalf of prestigious, brand-name customers. SITEL's major business challenge is to translate this immense volume of traffic into management statistics that show how the customer's business is being supported on a minute-by-minute basis.

"A contact center is a living entity, so first-class relations with clients is an absolute necessity," explains Annemieke Kinoo, business development engineer in the Brussels office. "Our comanagement approach involves customers closely in our call center activities. The main driver in CRM is knowing what your client wants. In order for us to satisfy our own client needs, we need to provide readily available information on the status of their accounts."

Shortly after SITEL established its Brussels operation, managers in the Reporting and Data Services department realised they needed a software solution to combine multiple sources of information into accurate management reports. Some information comes from the Siebel CRM system, where data is stored in an Oracle database. Other information comes from the Call Management System and Genesys (CTI) software on an Avaya telecommunications switch, where data is stored in an Informix database. Still other information comes from a human resources (HR) application that also uses Oracle.

"Only by consolidating this information can SITEL give an up-to-the-minute, accurate overview of the entire activity related to the customer account," says Peeters.

Previously, the team was attempting to create these reports using the generic reporting capabilities of Microsoft Access, along with proprietary reports from the Avaya switch software. Unfortunately, these revealed only a partial picture of the situation, which was complicated by a variety of incompatible Web interfaces, designed independently by each department. "There was a problem of inconsistency of screen layout and 'look and feel' of the Web interface from one client to another," recalls Peeters.

Building a Reporting Portal

To solve the problem, SITEL developers went to work creating a common portal interface named the SITEL Reporting Portal. WebFOCUS was used to create a centralized report server that supports users throughout the company. The reporting environment points to many types of platforms and data structures, yet users only need to learn one Web-based reporting environment.

"The objective was to have a professional framework for all clients," says Peeters. "Using WebFOCUS, this was achieved in a matter of weeks. WebFOCUS is a highly efficient reporting platform that can handle complex tasks. It utilizes a thin-client architecture and can work on multiple platforms."

Team Effort

SITEL's Central European operation manages 20 clients, each with a dedicated project team. This operation supports companies in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany. Peeters is charged with ensuring that accurate statistics are gathered and delivered to these customers. His work is vital for client relations, since clients are billed in one-minute increments according to the time spent on their behalf.

Within the Central European region, SITEL employs 2,000 people, 700 of whom are dedicated to the Belgian market. Most of these employees are operators who provide first- and second-line support to customers. A typical team includes 15 operators reporting to a team manager. Within each team, a client-services manager interfaces with customers and supplies detailed summary reports to clients.

The SITEL Reporting Portal supplies a common, corporate look and feel across all clients, with the client's logo displayed in the upper left-hand corner, channel push-buttons on the left, and tabular report information displayed on the right. This new reporting infrastructure gives team leaders total visibility of a client's contact center business.

"These statistics are all essential for our clients," Peeters concludes. "WebFOCUS gives us the integrated reports our managers need to run the business."