Revolutionary standards in Customer Service

Waiting only a few seconds to connect with the infoline, dedicated agents adapted to the real needs of customers and – what is the most important – problems solved on the very first contact with the call center. It’s the latest trend in customer service designed by the biggest companies in the world. As it turns out – it’s possible to be achieved. Comtrust’s team confirms this with its SAP BCM  implementation in Hungaropharma.

Hungaropharma is a Hungarian pharmaceutical company and operates in the highly demanding pharmaceutical market as a wholesaler. The recipients are customers who come from different areas of medical business – both private and institutional pharmacies, hospitals and health institutions, manufactures, non-profit companies, and pharmaceutical wholesalers.

Each customer has completely different needs, expectations, working hours, requirements from the call center, and response time. To cover all those needs Hungaropharma needed the most advanced technological support – IT solutions that overtake the latest standards available on the market. Specialized-dedicated-modules and tools implemented in Hungaropharma were designed by two teams: Comtrust (Poland) and ERP Consulting (Hungarian SAP partner).

Four pillars of customer service – how new standards were created

The reduction in customers’ waiting time in queues until the conversation starts is the first change in Hungaropharma’s contact center. It is a new benchmark. Previously, the call center market’s standard  was that calls answered within 20 seconds was a good service level. Requirements have changed and this level is unacceptable to customers now. Hungaropharma’s contractors do not want to wait long in queues, and for the majority of them the SLA of  5-6 seconds is acceptable. This change in customer-time-demands comes from a higher position of institutional customers in comparison to individual ones in the call center. Customers are more demanding and less flexible – they don’t want to wait and explain the same thing twice. They call to make an order and they expect special treatment. Practically, it means the service should be closed immediately and without any problems. In the pharmaceutical sector it is even more restrict – a customer is waiting at the window and wants to know whether he will get the medicine or not.

The second very important change is the strong need for personalized service and individual attitude towards customers in contacting with the infoline. “We implemented Preferred Agent Routing for the first time in Poland in 2011 for our customer from the insurance sector – says Piotr Pytlakowski, President of Comtrust. It was the first such implementation on the market. However, comparing the intensity of this tool usage in both companies, in Hungaropharma it is definitely higher which is largely due to the specific nature of the wholesale business and its frequency of contacts.”

Accounting customers-personal-preferences in outbound companies is the third very important change achieved through the SAP BCM implementation and integration with SAP CRM. “Hungarophrama set itself a goal to improve the effectiveness of sales campaigns. So we had to take into account not only purchasing preferences, sales levels and opportunities, prices and other indicators, but also the individual customer needs and expectations. For example, agents take into account working schedules of each pharmacy – for one person it is morning, for another afternoon. “- says Piotr Pytlakowski.

The fourth requirement – First Contact Resolution (in modern theory it is said to be standard requirement but it is not always guaranteed in practice). Fist Contact Resolution would not be possible without the integration between SAP BCM and SAP CRM. How does it look like? Customers are routed to right qualified agents. Agents can see on one screen all gathered information about the customer calling and do not have to switch between systems to solve the problem in a single call.

Basic guidelines – minimum waiting time and personalized service

Generally, the CRM’s role is to collect and analyze information about customers, however without contact center it is unproductive. When dealing with a large number of customers, all the knowledge about their interactions, transactions and activities should be automatically verified and displayed on one screen. If not, manual search for information and dialing could take even more time than a call conversation. Hungaropharma possesses this advanced functionality. It was possible thanks to implementation and integration of both SAP BCM and SAP CRM and adopting of two different call routing mechanisms: prioritization and preferred agent.

Every day Hungaropharma receives about 1,500 calls which are supported by 20-30 agents at the infoline. Customers contacting with the teleservice department are now recognized based on their phone number. If the phone number says nothing about the customer, the second level of verification starts – he is recognized based on his ID. Contact center SAP BCM verifies this information in SAP CRM. The information about priorities established for each customer is sent from SAP CRM to SAP BCM as the response. Currently in Hungaropharma there are seven prioritization levels. Each line has a different minimum wait time (SLA). The most restrictive is the VIP queue – preferential customers are served almost immediately. Rest lines are served according to each customer-group-priority and maximum-response-times are between 40 – 120 seconds. Customers who are not recognized in SAP CRM wait the longest.

In addition to the above prioritization processes, customers have assigned dedicated consultants –  accounts. How does it work? With the incoming call SAP BCM checks on-line two pieces of information: what priority has the customer and to whom they should be routed to. The verification of preferred agents takes place on two levels: in SAP CRM (who are those agents) and in SAP BCM (which of them are free). If the customer is not connected with his account, SAP BCM redirects the call to other agents or leaves a request for “call back”. These “call back” are stored simultaneously in SAP BCM and SAP CRM.

Likewise, the preferences are used in outbound campaigns. For example, in telesales campaigns it looks as follows. Every day at 11.00 a.m. SAP CRM prepares the database called “cases”. Cases include information about customers, contacts and specific tasks which should be realized by SAP BCM. What more, the cases include the priorities and the personalization defined earlier. This allows agents not only to connect with each customer exactly when the customer expects so, but also shows the right script of conversation as well as knowledge about previous interactions, orders and future projections.

In order to provide such advanced features it was necessary not only to integrate the contact center SAP BCM with SAP CRM, but also to build dedicated functional modules – says Piotr Pytlakowski. The created system is the latest thing that has come out. Hungaropharma has the tool that in just 50 msec (1 second = 1000 msec) lists and exchanges a number of different types of information between SAP BCM and SAP CRM on-line. The end result gives unprecedented benefits for customers. The service and contacts (inbound and outbound) are personalized on both sides. The company knows to whom and when make a call and with which priority to answer incoming calls. And its customers – they know when and with whom they want to talk. Additionally, the SAP BCM implementation was complex because it should answer very tough requirements of the pharmacy market where SLA is  “strict” to the limit. Now, thanks to the cooperation between Comtrust and ERP Consulting these advanced functionalities can be successfully offered to customers in both countries”- sums up Piotr Pytlakowski.

HUNGAROPHARMA ZRt. (Hungaropharma) is a privately held pharmaceutical company. It is engaged in the wholesale distribution of medicines. The company distributes all kinds of medicines which have been authorized in Hungary. Hungaropharma sold around 20,000 different kinds of products in pharmacies. The company partners includes 2005 private pharmacies, 27 pharmaceutical wholesalers, 165 hospitals and health institutions, 200 manufacturers and 69 institutional pharmacies. The company has trade centers across Kaposvar, Budapest, Debrecen, and Miskolc. It distributes the products in major cities as well as in small towns on daily basis. The company is headquartered at Budapest, Hungary.