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SearchDataManagement.com: Customer Data
Integration Edition
January 29, 2008
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FUZZY SEARCH HELPS CLEAR UP CALL CENTER CONFUSION
http://go.techtarget.com/r/2963249/6582435
Jeff Kelly, News Editor
When executives at Corporate Express began looking at ways to improve
efficiency, they expected to find at least a few redundant servers or
applications. What they discovered were more than two dozen separate
customer data systems running throughout the company.
A subsidiary of Corporate Express NV in the Netherlands, the
Broomfield, Colo.-based company had staked its claim as one of the
top business-to-business office supplies vendors in the market thanks
in part to numerous acquisitions over the last decade. But each
acquisition brought with it not just revenue but customer data and
databases as well. It didn't take long for the company to realize it
needed to streamline operations.
"We started looking at our overall enterprise architecture, and one
of the things we began to document was the amount of customer data
replication we were doing," said Doug LaVelle, head of the company's
business relationship management team. To make matters worse,
customer data often needed to be entered into separate systems
manually, LaVelle said, almost guaranteeing inconsistencies.
To start the streamlining process, the company decided to consolidate
its 28 call centers -- distributed throughout the country -- into one
main call center with a secondary, back-up location. LaVelle and his
team began identifying the processes used in those call centers to
conduct customer transactions and discovered no fewer than 26 systems
containing customer data. "[Not surprisingly] we saw a lot
inefficiencies with how [call center representatives] went in
and found customers in the different systems," LaVelle said.
Learn how Corporate Express improved call center efficiency with
fuzzy search:
http://go.techtarget.com/r/2963250/6582435
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http://go.techtarget.com/r/2963251/6582435
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