“Remedy Customer Service and Support is woven into the fabric of what we do today. We’ve had a first call resolution rate of over 90% for five quarters.”
--Michael McCarty, Director of Customer Support
IVANS, Inc. provides technology solutions for 475 insurance and healthcare organizations, supporting more than 30,000 independent agents and 14,000 health care providers in the United States and Canada. Their call center provides technical support for sophisticated networking solutions for each of these customers. Downtime is not an option.
IVANS determined that a new customer support solution was needed to both improve customer satisfaction and increase support center cost efficiency.
Responsiveness - Critical to Customer Satisfaction
As a value-added network service provider, IVANS is charged with supporting their customers' network solutions, ensuring that they meet government regulations for security and connectivity. This puts their customer support department on the front line for keeping customers up and running -- and ultimately for keeping them satisfied. In the first quarter of 2000, IVANS established an initial benchmark of customer satisfaction through extensive surveying. Problematically, they discovered that customers had low marks for overall responsiveness to their issues.
In addition to raising their customer satisfaction levels, IVANS also wanted to work proactively to learn more about their customers in order to cultivate stronger ties. They anticipated that this would improve loyalty, reduce customer churn, and thus maximize profits over the long term.
Mr. McCarty worked with his management team to set an aggressive target for total customer satisfaction of 90 percent. "We felt that if we could achieve scores that are more often seen in the consumer environment, we'd really be doing something."
Functionality Supports Best Practices and Productivity
IVANS selected Remedy Customer Support, which includes features such as centralized customer information, intelligent routing and assignments, knowledge management capabilities, and automated escalations/notifications, to improve their customer support operations.With Remedy, IVANS developed a customer support operation that was more integrated with the overall IT organization and that functioned more productively and proactively.
The new solution supported the evolution of an effective knowledge base integrated with the Remedy Customer Support application. Additionally, proactive relationship management came via automated alerts and the built-in workflow. Now, IVANS can easily contact their customers to advise them of pending outages so that they can minimize the impact to their business.
The implementation of best practice processes embedded in the Remedy solution has enabled the IVANS staff to handle 50 percent more support calls without increasing support staff. Reporting Boosts Satisfaction and Impacts Bottom Line
IVANS also uses the workflow functionality of Remedy Customer Support to send out automated surveys to monitor their customer satisfaction rates on an ongoing basis. This allows for a dialog with their customers that can continually be funneled back into improving their support best practices.
IVANS has continually analyzed their customer satisfaction numbers, and the improvement they realized after the Remedy implementation are impressive. They found that customers are getting first call resolution over 90 percent of the time, compared to 65 percent of the time before the staff was using Remedy Customer Support.
The impact on the customer has been significant—the reduction in downtime directly improves their productivity.Improving this business metric alone prompts Michael McCarty to state that Remedy Customer Support has “really proven a direct value.”
Other efficiencies have resulted as well. IVANS allows their customers to track the status of their support tickets or other types of information directly through a password protected website. This provides up-to-the-minute information directly to the customer. More importantly, this self-service option reduces the demand on the call center and directly impacts the cost of running an external support operation. As an added bonus, IVANS found that information systematically collected with the Remedy solution had a direct impact on their Accounts Receivable area. Because of a complex billing system based on many variables, customer bills had significant amounts left outstanding while support issues were being resolved.
The new Remedy solution generated needed reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, enabling both management and support staff to work with customers to understand ongoing billing issues.
Within eighteen months of rolling out the Remedy solution, the IVANS support team was able to reduce 144 billing disputes to about 10 open items using the data that they had built in the Remedy Customer Service and Support system.
The net result was that “we went from millions to tens of thousands in accounts receivable outstanding,” asserts Mr. McCarty. “The integrated and automated system has given us the transparency of information that we were looking for. In my area of operation…I impact profitability by reducing costs. Remedy has helped me contribute directly to the company’s bottom line.” Future Plans
IVANs has many future plans for Remedy Customer Service and Support. Remedy applications utilize the development environment and integrated platform of Remedy’s Action Request System®.As a result, out-of-box features can be easily tailored and new applications can be developed in an integrated environment. “It’s just a matter of timing…we have a great opportunity to build on our Remedy solution,” concludes McCarty.
IVANs plans to implement a centralized order management system that will give management reporting capabilities and greater control. This will proactively prevent billing problems on the back end that might fuel outstanding amounts in accounts receivable. IVANs also plans further enhancements of rules and content management for their knowledge base so that it adds even more value as dynamic part of the solution.
Conclusion
Consistent, efficient and proactive service is a key differentiator in today’s economy.IVANs has successfully deployed Remedy Customer Support
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