Support Center, Inc. (A)
Sue Conger
University of Dallas
Abstract
Support Center, Inc. is a Call Center that conducts collections activity for its client companies. SCI has suffered several outages over the last year that worry the new CIO. The company has many IT issues to be addressed but continuity planning appears to be one that can be a 'quick win.' What should SCI do for continuity planning and how much should it spend?
Keywords: ITIL, IT Service Management, Call Center, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Telecomm Management
Introduction
Support Center, Inc. (SCI) is a $400 million, 190-person call center that operates two shifts Monday through Friday and half days on Saturday. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the company, Bob Wentworth, is a new employee in charge of technology planning, deployment, and management. Bob's job is to bring SCI's technology up to date and help them learn to better manage the phenomenal growth the company has experienced in the last two years. As Bob delved into the company's problems, he realized that the changes needed would be long term in development but that the company was suffering outages from which it had slow recoveries. Bob decided that continuity planning for both the company and the IT organization were needed, yet the issue of what to do and how much to spend required further analysis
SCI History
SCI is the amalgamation of three call center companies that each had its own area of expertise: Somerfield, Inc., Charleston & Associates, and Telecomm Sales, Inc. Somerfield, Inc., the largest of the three and the company founded by Charles Somerfield, the President and Chairman of SCI, is a call center in the business of collecting past due accounts for companies in the telecommunications industry. The Somerfield call center performed what are called 1st Party collections, during which the Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) act as employees of the telecomm company and follow scripts to collect the funds owed. CSRs are paid a salary with bonuses as they reach various collection plateaus. The bonuses are considered incentives and to reach plateaus requires constant success in collections efforts.
Charleston & Associates is a collections agency that collected 90-day and older accounts of any type. In the SCI environment, the CSRs are referred to as 3rd Party collectors. Third party CSRs do not follow a script and are allowed to use any legal and ethical means to collect money. However, there is no regulation of this industry and the means are rarely questioned, especially when the amounts collected are substantial. CSRs in this industry tend to be paid completely on commission that is a percentage of the funds they collect.
Telecomm Sales, Inc. was owned by James Ingles before the merger and is the third company on which SCI is based. Telecomm is a 1st Party selling organization that sold products, such as magazine subscriptions, via sales calls that were guided by scripts. Problems in this segment of the SCI business forced it to exit this market several months ago. At the time it is discontinued, selling accounted for 15% of sales but 30% of Call Center cost.
The companies merged two years ago as the owners were all friends who felt the synergies of the combined companies would be more profitable than the separate companies. However, that expectation has not happened. Operational issues, some of which relate to IT, are perceived as keeping the new company from realizing expected benefits. Bob Wentworth, the new CIO, had an illustrious Fortune 100 career as Chief Information Officers (CIO) and call center manager with over 4000 employees. As CIO, Bob's charge was to help the company better integrate its technology to become a strategic asset.
The merged SCI organization has had six CIOs in its two-year existence. The Information Technology organization (IT) is believed to be out of control because each CIO, upon being hired, had declared serious issues that they would then be unable to improve within three months of their hiring thus leading to their subsequent dismissal. Bob's first task is to assess the state of technology, determine the most serious shortcomings, develop a plan to fix them, and then begin the remediation.
Organization
SCI is a casually run organization with no formal organization chart; the diagram in Figure 1 depicts the organization structure as described by Bob Wentworth. In general, the major staff included the owner, Charles Summerfield and his partners Jim Charleston and Jim Ingles, Garth Esterby, the CFO, who manages corporate finance and oversees accounting and IT. Anne Paige manages accounting receivables with four people and payables with two people. Bob Wentworth is the CIO with about 20 people in IT.
Gary Jones, the Marketing Manager, along with his staff of two and all of the partners, develop business and sell SCI services. Janice Barnes, VP of Human Resources, is responsible for a staff of four who hire, fire, and administer benefits. Payroll is outsourced. HR is an important job at SCI because they experience about 180% turnover in the call center annually. Barnes reports to Ingles.
James Charleston managed the Call Center and Client Services. Arlette Johnson is the manager of Customer Service. Once a sale is made, it is serviced and monitored by the 20-person Customer Service staff. Steve McHenry manages the Call Center. Steve manages about 190 customer service representatives (CSRs) and supervisors during a 15-hour workday.
The Call Center
The Call Center is organized into two groups for 1st- party and 3rd- party collections (explained below). The day shift is the larger of the two with 140 customer service representatives (CSRs) working four to eight hours each. Ninety CSRs work the second shift. The 1st party CSRs are grouped into four teams, three teams for each of the major clients' campaigns. All four teams support all other clients. The three largest clients provide about 70% of the billings while the other 1,800 clients provide the remaining 20% of the billings.
IT outages are immediately noticeable in the Call Center where 15 minutes of downtime is considered a significant problem.
Start of Day
At the beginning of the day, the Dialer Administrator (DA), Juan, initiates operation for the Davox dialer call dialer system. Juan downloads client campaign information (client payables) via file transfer protocol (FTP) from the SCI web site queuing them for processing each day. The Davox is initialized and the campaign information named and stored in anticipation of collection processing. Campaign information includes client ID (e.g., Indiana Cable Company would be InCaCo), campaign ID (e.g., 120307 for December, 2007 accounts over 60-days old), customer ID (e.g., the account number for the InCaCo customer being called), the customer's name, phone, amount past due, past due date, and number of days past due. Clients each have from 1,000 to 100,000 customer accounts that are in arrears and are to be called by SCI. The DA loads from one to ten campaigns per team at a time, releasing them from the queue as another campaign completes its cycle.
Occasionally, about once a month, Juan will forget that he has already processed a campaign and he overlays it with either the same one or another of the same campaign ID. When that happens, any moneys collected under the old name and all records of those collections are no longer accessible. If the error is identified before the close of that day's business, Dennis McCardle in IT uses a utility to recreate the lost campaign, as best he can. To recreate the campaign payment records requires identification of the error before end of day processing during which records for the day are archived.
When a new campaign is contracted, Steve gives campaign information to the DA verbally. The DA then creates a spreadsheet to 'tick off' the campaigns as they are loaded into the Davox, processed, and filtered as required. Once campaigns are loaded, the DA sets the timing for each campaign and CSR work can begin. To begin CSR collections, Lyricall software, which serves up dialogue and customer information screens, is loaded into the Davox and begins processing.
The DAs learn their job through on-the-job training by another DA. There is no documentation for the job, no written processes, and no Davox documentation. When Davox-related problems occur, about once every two months, Dennis McCardle in IT is called.
CSR Logon
To begin an agent session, a CSR logs onto his/her PC, then logs on to a campaign. If CSRs forget to logon to the campaign, they will not get credit (or pay) for their collections as they cannot be tied back to the person making the collection. There is no way for the application to verify that an agent is logged on to a campaign.
Once on the system, CSRs are routed incoming, outgoing, or both types of phone calls based on Davox call activity. There are approximately two seconds between calls when the dialer and incoming activity are both busy, there may be as much as 15 minutes between calls when they are not busy.
Collections
The Call Center performs both 1st and 3rd party collections. The 1st Party process relates to services provided when CSRs act as if they are employees of the company. For instance, they answer incoming calls, "Good morning, this is Stacy at [client company name], how may I help you?"
First Party clients are serviced via both incoming and outgoing phone calls, and are provided two types of services: Collections of past-due bills, and regular Customer Service for which they answer questions such as, client hours of operation, payment locations, or product specifications and functions.
The CSR answers a call, determining from a Lyricall script (served from the Davox) whether it is payment or service related. Then the CSR verbally validates that the person owing money is on the phone; this is called a 'right-party contact' or (RPC). If it is not an RPC, the process changes. If it is an RPC, the agent discusses the past-due amount and seeks to collect the money. Once a result is reached, the CSR enters a call result and the process is continued. A collection call results in one of the following results: Dispute, refuse to pay, previous payment, no payment, payment, or promise-to-pay.
Third-party collections are similar to 1st party collections in that the goal is to collect past-due monies. But, there also are many important differences between 1st and 3rd party collections that also are the source of some problems. One noticeable difference between 3rd party and 1st party is in the complexity of payment processing. There are different processes for credit card, direct check, promise-to-pay, no payment, and wrong-party calls. As a result, the logon processes are the same but 3rd party uses no scripts to conduct the dialog and must manually open and close screens that are automatic during the 1st party process. Third party CSRs have no scripts and thus must raise all screens manually. This is another source of problems. Third party CSRs bypass some screens, creating their own processes and violating company policy in the bargain. These personalized processes result in partial payment posting and inconsistencies between the several files that store payment information.
The different payment tactics bring some complexities to light. The Lyricall and Davox software work together to provide 1st party scripts (as appropriate), record termination codes, and update Davox-based client call files with customer contact outcomes. SCI's own customer files on the AS/400 are updated for people who had been called in the past and add records for new people. The AS/400 files are created after the Davox transaction completes as a way to double check payment processing in event of Davox Call File errors. These AS/400 file updates require all CSRs to manually open a new window for updating and are not part of the Davox Lyricall process. An average eight-second delay in opening this customer file delays the collection process and annoys the CSRs. Some CSRs work too fast for the AS/400 process to compute and store the data and result in partial or unstored transactions.
Three large customers have transactions sent to their A/R systems to log payments real-time. Delays for Internet, client network, and/or client applications cause annoyance to the CSRs who don’t always wait for this subprocess to complete.
Screen opening for credit card and direct check transactions is successful for only about 95% of transactions, but the software gives no status back to indicate what the problem is. As a result, CSRs kept their own manual list of calls, customer names, and payments collected to ensure the accuracy of their commissions. A fair amount of discrepancy between company, client, and CSR records exists, as do discrepancies between the Davox and AS/400 records.
End of Day
To end a day, all CSRs log off of their campaigns and the Davox is shut down
IT Organization
The IT organization chart is shown in Figure 2. There are three, two and two staff in each of Special Projects, Financial Apps, and Operations, respectively. Two employees have been at SCI with Summerfield since before the merger: Dennis McCardle and Pat Andrews. Dennis is the key support person for the Call Center and had been CIO #5 of the six prior CIOs. He is still at SCI because he is Summerfield’s son-in-law. Dennis supported all of Operations, the Call Center, client upload and script creation, and the SCI web site. He had two operators reporting to him.
While all IT staff are intensive computing users, none of the projects is critical enough that an outage would cause a significant problem. The IT area could be without computing resources for a week, if needed, before a problem became critical. The most important purpose of the IT organization is to keep the Call Center functioning.
IT Operations
Davox is known as a predictive dialer hardware/software configuration. A predictive dialer is a combination of hardware and software that makes, monitors, and routes phone calls to call agents. Prediction works by adjusting the calling process to the number of agents it predicts will be available when the calls it places are predicted to be answered. CSR talk time can increase from 20 or fewer minutes an hour to over 50 minutes an hour by using predictive dialing equipment versus having agents place their own calls.
Once an incoming call is answered by the Davox (or an outgoing call is validated as having a person on the other end), customer information is retrieved and the call is transferred to a CSR for processing. If the call detects an answering machine, disconnect, TeleZapper, etc. the call is terminated without being passed to an agent. Terminated calls are marked for retry at a later time.
Davox gets incoming calls from two directly connected, T-1 trunk lines. Outbound calls are made by a Siemens switch, which can determine the lowest rate from among seven long-distance vendors. The Davox has an outbound capability but it is not used as it cannot determine the line to use by rate. The Davox reads customer records to obtain phone numbers and passes the numbers to the Siemens.
The Davox tracks agent activity at a detailed level to allow management reporting for various measures, for instance talk time, idle time, average answer time for incoming calls, incoming hand-ups, and average calls waiting. Agents can track their own work and first-line supervisors can monitor CSR calls to verify quality and track agent activity throughout the day. In addition, supervisors get paper reports on agent activity by campaign, time period, and type of activity.
Several outages have affected the entire company over the last year. The Davox suffers outages about twice per year for 1-2 days. Further, there are no manuals or reference materials on the Davox available in the organization. The Siemens switch suffers outages approximately once per year of two days. Davox and Siemens outages are corrected and managed by the vendors. Even though there are contracts calling for one-day support for problems, in all cases, the support has been provided on the second day of the outages.
Web Site outages for the client upload/download software occur approximately twice a year. The last outage had lasted one week and cost the company several clients. Other parts of the web site rely only on HTML and have not suffered outages.