Sprint's Global Connection Services Calls on WebFOCUS for Customer Support

Snapshot

Organization Sprint Global Connection Services, provider of operator and prepaid card services, and national directory assistance calling, for Sprint customers

The Challenge To enable more timely and efficient management of call-center operations by simplifying the reporting process

The Strategy Deploy Web-based reporting software to more rapidly consolidate and transmit information via the corporate intranet

The Results Dramatically shortened the information delivery cycle, allowing managers to respond quickly to ever-changing business conditions

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, WebFOCUS MRE, FOCUS Desktop (WebFOCUS Developer Studio)

In an era of highly charged business competition, customer service has become a great deal more than a slogan. High-caliber service is particularly essential in the telecommunications industry, where customer turnover is common and volatility high. Dazzled by a plethora of competing offers in local, long distance, wireless, and Internet services, customers tend to jump from one provider to another. Prompt, reliable service often makes the crucial difference between acquiring and retaining customers – or losing them.

Because of all this "churn," customer support programs are getting more attention than ever before. Good customer support is a stabilizing factor: the better the support, the more likely it is that the customer will stay in the fold.

It is precisely this spirit that animates Sprint's Global Connection Services (GCS). GCS is a provider of operator-assisted calling services, prepaid card services, and national directory assistance for Sprint customers and vendors. With four call centers staffed by more than 1,100 agents handling around 300,000 calls each day, monitoring each center's call volume and individual agent performance is crucial to ensuring optimum customer satisfaction.

To optimize call-center performance, GCS rolled out a Web-based reporting system pivoting on Information Builders' WebFOCUS. The new system has automated and enhanced the reporting activities for the entire organization.

"The difference between then and now is almost impossible to describe," says Wendy Kettering, the energetic database analyst and customer support pro who has introduced WebFOCUS to Sprint's GCS group. "We have evolved our performance reporting capabilities from a rigid, inflexible, and slow information delivery system to one that moves at warp speed."

Sifting Through the Data

Kettering's drive for Web-based reporting began when she moved over to GCS from the customer service side of the organization. At the time, call-center performance reports were being created via a series of Excel spreadsheets. Massaging and manipulating the performance data through Excel macros was a laborious and time-consuming process. "Just the process of pulling down reports and putting them into spreadsheets took an hour each day," she recalls. "In addition, on Mondays we had to roll up the weekend performance figures and process weekly reports. That took half a day."

Despite her team's constant efforts, users were not getting the reports they needed fast enough – and the reports that they were able to produce consisted of canned information and didn't allow for much flexibility. For instance, in order to see a call center's performance statistics for a particular time period, Kettering had to pull paper copies of the call history, enter the data into an Excel spreadsheet, and then generate a custom report.

A larger problem for GCS as a whole was that the management team could not easily track ongoing business changes, such as the many variables affecting call-center performance. If GCS added a new vendor to its services, for example, it would add whole new sets of data that would then require new reports. The tedious process of massaging the data and dragging it into spreadsheets would begin again.

"We needed to dramatically reduce the time it took to get performance reports into the hands of our users, and to give them a great deal more flexibility to customize their own reports," Kettering sums up.

Finding a Reporting Solution

After a series of discussions with key members of GCS, a decision was made to evaluate desktop reporting tools that could function in a client/server environment. The group reviewed various vendors – including Oracle, Crystal Reports, and Information Builders. Kettering was strongly in favor of Information Builders' FOCUS Desktop solution.

"I was all for the FOCUS Desktop solution from the beginning," she affirms. '' I wanted to work with an easy-to-use language, rather than have to learn a more complicated system."

Within a few months, Kettering had built a single-user version of a FOCUS Desktop reporting application on her own computer. The productivity benefits were immediate. "FOCUS Desktop reduced the report processing time considerably," she says. "We went from an hour a day to around ten minutes for the daily reports, and from four hours to 30 minutes for the weekly reports."

Taking It to the Web

The original idea was to install FOCUS Desktop at all of the call centers, along with Information Builders' EDA Middleware to establish connectivity to the database. But the cost and complexity associated with rolling out and maintaining software at all these locations were prohibitive. While Kettering was working out the architectural nuances of this configuration, she was introduced to Information Builders' WebFOCUS. "I was talking with an Information Builders representative, explaining my concerns about rolling out the client/server scenario, and he suggested I go to a WebFOCUS seminar," she recalls. "At the seminar they showed us the WebFOCUS application being used by the Los Angeles County judicial system. It blew me away. When I saw the ease of use, I immediately arranged for a demo of the product for our organization."

Many groups within Sprint were in the process of migrating their computer applications to the corporate intranet, so the GCS group immediately saw the advantage of WebFOCUS for reporting. "The architectural simplicity of using Web browsers rather than installing client-side software was undeniable," Kettering sums up.

WebFOCUS was installed, and Kettering went to work building a powerful data access and reporting architecture that minimizes complexity for users. "Technically speaking, we embedded CGI calls, FOCEXEC names, and all the pertinent data selection variables right into the HTML code," she explains. "This keeps the complexity behind the scenes."

By using radio buttons, drop-down menus, and text boxes, users write their own report requests. "They click on a link in their browser that takes them to a page where they can fill in the variables," Kettering continues. "Once they click the 'submit' button, the CGI call activates the server, runs the report, and sends back the results. EDA is used to communicate with a FOCUS database, which resides on a Windows NT server. It's really slick – and the users love it!"

Creating Useful Reports

Buoyed by the success of the reporting architecture, Kettering began downloading historical call-center data from a legacy database into the FOCUS database on the Windows NT server. "We do a lot of trending, averaging, and assimilation of data based on our history, so we had to go back to the beginning of 1998 and get that all in one place," she explains.

Once the data was downloaded, creating reports that users could access through a WebFOCUS Managed Reporting Environment was a "strikingly simple process," according to Kettering. A good example is the standard reports that constitute GCS's national call summary information. "We look at these reports daily," Kettering says. "They tell us how we're meeting our objectives with regard to call volumes, whether we're handling calls in a certain amount of time, and the level of service we are delivering to our customers."

There are two sets of national summary reports. One tells GCS management how a particular call center handled its overall volume, while the other is designed for call-center supervisors monitoring agent performance. This reporting hierarchy allows managers to easily measure performance according to multiple criteria. For example, they can compare call volumes on certain days of the month, quickly honing in on information that helps measure the overall performance of the organization and verify staffing needs. "We look at the call volume on a daily basis," says Kettering. "Management uses that information to make staffing decisions from day to day. In the old system, it might have taken weeks to get that kind of information. Today, it's right there all the time, so we can react much more quickly."

Increasing Corporate Knowledge

In the future, GCS will be further refining the reports to include call volume by product offering. "We'll be able to see more accurately what is driving call volumes, and staff up or down accordingly," Kettering says. Also, Kettering will be loading expense information, so that GCS can begin tracking expenses to perform cost-per-call analysis. And because the call center personnel are not bogged down doing reporting the old-fashioned way, they have more time to do analysis – such as determining how many people are needed on the phones, when, and for what times.

"We're giving managers real-time access to the activities in the call centers and a better way to analyze business performance," Kettering concludes. "The more we work with WebFOCUS, the more ideas we get on how to improve our business. The data reporting possibilities just keep growing. And they are attainable with WebFOCUS."