Minister's Forerword
Introduction
Credits
Acknowledgements
IT Solutions
PROJECT OBJECTIVE
DEVELOP A WEB-BASED CUSTOMER SUPPORT SYSTEM
IT Solutions specialises in the provision of Customer Interaction Software. It has clients in 15 European countries. In 1998, IT Solutions introduced its first software product, Simone, for the international call centre market. Simone has already been implemented in five European countries and had won international awards.
Business Case for eCommerce Infrastructure Project
IT Solutions proposed the development of AnswerOne, an eCommerce support product. Customers shopping on the Internet are often frustrated by the absence of an immediate answer to questions about products e.g. if a product is available in a different colour.
Existing solutions include:
1. Make a telephone call to the merchant company - this may involve an international call and defeats the purpose of shopping on-line.
2. Send an e-mail - IT Solutions collected data from their extensive call centre contacts which indicated that emails were treated as low priority compared to live calls.
3. Use a call back button - this usually works very well, however the customer still has to log back on to complete the transaction.
4. Use a fax back button - although not widely used, this is popular and useful as it helps maintain the customer’s anonymity.
eBusiness Solution
AnswerOne takes a customer’s enquiry, relays it to a call centre representative who can answer it and relays the reply to the customer, together with a link to the web page they were on when they posed the question.
AnswerOne works as follows:
- The customer completes a template outlining the information they need.
- AnswerOne scrutinises the answers on the template. It combines the priority of the required response, the preferred type of response (phone, fax, email, web), the skills required to answer the call, the language of the response and other information into a routing call.
- AnswerOne then routes the request to a call centre queue based on the data in the request and its routing rules, having determined which group of people is best skilled to answer the question. It also reviews who is available to answer the query by checking who is logged onto the system via Internet, Extranet or Intranet.
- The call centre agent - who may be home or office based - receives the customer request and composes a response using standard templates and by adding free text.
- The response is relayed by fax, email or preferably with a ‘personal web page’. A personal web page adds the most value for the customer since it includes an answer to their query in the relevant language, an automatic return to the page from which they made the query, links to other relevant pages and an optional order now button.
Who will benefit from this e-Commerce Infrastructure Development?
AnswerOne is a commercial software package. IT Solutions are currently involved in negotiations with a number of large organisations with call centres in Ireland and the UK.
AnswerOne will also enhance the potential for call centre agents to be home-based, a growing trend in Ireland
IT Solutions
18-19 College Green
Dublin 2
Tel: + 353 1 671 8344
www.sim-one.com
evelynd@itsolutions.ie