OTRS CE Based Internal Support System for on-line Retail Company
Customer support in on-line Retail business is an important part of the sales process. Potential buyers call the contact center to get help with product choice. Read how the company improved the customer service timelines with Radiant System’s help.
Our customer is one of the leading online retailers of car and moto spare parts in Europe. The company sells nearly 2.5 millions products of 545 brands in 26 European countries. The customer support has to work perfectly in a company of this size, as it significantly drives sales. Not many owners can choose the right parts for their vehicle. Customers contact it for help. The company doesn’t just sell spare parts, it solves customers’ issues with a strong technical support and a product range in line with customers’ needs.
The Challenge: Lower the Customer Support Cost
Here is the spare parts search and sales process as it is. The customer calls or emails the contact center asking if a certain part works for their car model? There are more than 700 operators in the contact center, and none of them have expertise in the automotive industry. So, contact center managers get the engineers to help answer customer questions. There are about 100 engineers in the company.
Also, customers can call the contact center with some other questions. For example, they need to formalize a warranty or reclamation. This type of request is sent to the company back office, where other departments’ employees handle it.
Every time when the contact center employee gets a new customer request, they put the information into the inhouse ERP system manually and contact other departments via Slack. Meaning that they text an engineer something like: “Hey, Alex, help me pls, does this item number fit the Volkswagen Polo 2014?”, and wait for the answer in the messenger.
This approach works fine, customers receive the information they need and are satisfied with the service. There are only two buts:
1) Internal communication in a big company is complicated. The manual input of information into the ERP system and texting other departments via Slack takes more time than the company would like to spend on each task.
2) It’s impossible to evaluate the work of engineers, back office employees, and contact center managers. You can’t implement KPIs into Slack’s direct messages.
The classic ticket system would work well with these tasks. It would allow both to combine in one place the communication between different departments and to set a clear KPI system. The peculiarity of the project was that the data had to be transferred to the new system from Zendesk. Serious license fee wasn’t profitable for the company, and in order to reduce the support costs, it was decided to migrate from Zendesk to a more economical system.
The new system had to meet the next requirements:
1) Be user-friendly and easy in terms of improvements. It has to allow for further development without help from expensive experts.
2) Have a low cost of implementation and follow-up support.
3) Allow API integration with other systems like the current ERP system and a planned CRM system.
The IT team was choosing between Naumen and basic Service Desk systems. The company decided to implement OTRS CE based Service Desk because of its flexibility, open source code and cheap implementation. For these reasons they contacted Radiant System.
“The key factor of choosing Radiant System is a simple communication with the team. We speak the same language and understand each other in the best way. The second factor is the reaction speed of their experts. The third is that Radiant System understands our needs and is always working with us. They not only solve their tasks, but also offer solutions that would make our work more efficient in the future.”
Ivan K., Head of Development at Contact Center
The Solution: OTRS CE and Partnership with Radiant System
OTRS CE implementation took 2 months. In this time Radiant System helped to migrate data from Zendesk to the new Service Desk and integrate with WDE in Genesys. The process was divided into 5 stages:
Stage 1: Draft a Course of Action
The IT department formed the technical specifications with a list of necessary services. In a month they got everything installed and configured in a test environment.
Stage 2: the First Testing
Primarily the solution was tested inside the company. The company’s team actively gave suggestions for any additional features. So at this stage the tickets auto distribution was developed and added to the system.
Stage 3: Implementation to Tech Department
The system launch was also divided into a few steps. Firstly, one service was tested by several engineers, then analyzed and optimized, and checked for any operational problems in prod. Internal customers were satisfied with the first ticket test. Only after that the system was launched for all engineers.
The first month of work showed some performance issues. IT team together with Radiant System analyzed the Service Desk, optimized code and set advanced monitoring of OTRS CE and databases.
Stage 4: Scaling to Other Departments
When the system work was fully debugged, OTRS CE was scaled to all engineers. The company’s team built BI reports, and when it was finished OTRS CE was scaled to other departments, including back office with warranty, reclamation, and return services.
Stage 5: Integrating with Telephony and ERP System
In the last stage was integrated OTRS CE with Genesis telephony system and ERP.
The Result: Measurable and Cost Saving Customer Support
By using OTRS CE the company got an opportunity to implement KPI. The speed of response in each department (contact center, back office, engineers) became measurable. The average timeline of the ticket solving shrunk to 10 minutes.
“Among others, the project was remembered for its scale. We helped the client to implement a system with processing of more than 1 million tickets per year. We are especially proud of the 100% increase in the level of satisfaction of internal customers. We were lucky to cooperate with a team of real professionals who were happy to share their expertise with Radiant System both at the initial stages of OTRS CE implementation and at the stage of support and improvements.”
Alexey Yusov, CEO of Radiant System
In less than a year there were over a million tickets handled in the system. That’s about 150 000 tickets a month. There are 1900 agents registered in the system, and 400 to 800 employees work simultaneously.
The internal satisfaction survey showed that the speed of ticket solving increased several times. The employees’ complaints about the customer requests process were quite regular before the new system was launched, but the company’s clear report system solved that problem.
Tickets auto distribution feature reduced the time of request processing even more. Now the system finds a free back office worker or an engineer automatically and without bias instead of being manually distributed by engineers or back office workers.
The Future Plans
· Next year the company plans to expand OTRS CE features to external customers. For example, customer requests could get to OTRS CE directly instead of through the ERP system. Engineers will answer the customer questions directly. That would lower costs for the contact center upkeep.
· The system will be scaled to other departments that the contact center communicates with. It all allows to exclude the communication in Slack, which is impossible to track.
· The CRM system launch is planned. This system will be fully integrated with OTRS CE to create the common soft format and to save employees’ time with no switching between different platforms.
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