Each year, SAP presents the SAP Quality Awards for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to recognize customers who have achieved excellence in planning and executing their SAP projects and programs, delivering significant value to their organizations. INEA with SAP Contact Center (BCM) implementation won the silver prize.

INEA

INEA is the largest alternative telecommunications operator in the western part of Poland serving about 200 000 households and business customers. Comprehensive support from IT solutions is necessary if the company wants to improve and maintain professional service for such a large number of customers. For this purpose it was decided to implement SAP Contact Center (BCM) which enables multi-channel communication with customer service center by fixed telephony, mobile, e-mail and chat. SAP also enables queueing and prioritization all types of connections. Thanks to Agile methodology implementation project was completed within 3 months.

Implementation

Łukasz Dec from the business newspaper „Rzeczpospolita” interviewed Maciej Ziemiański and Bartłomiej Mikołajczak from INEA about SAP Contact Center implementation. Below there is the summery (full interview – link).

Why SAP Contact Center?

Every months INEA’s Customer Service Center registers about 50 thousand. incoming phone calls, 500 chat requests and 400 e-mails. Last five years INEA noted a steady increase in incoming traffic average around 15-17 percent. yearly. Before INEA used their own call center system based on open source. This system has grown with the company starting from 4-5 agents 10 years ago to 50 agents today. The old system become insufficient.

It was one of the main reasons. The second one was the need for more sophisticated statistical and analytical tools. The third was INEA’s strategic decision made earlier about the migration to SAP environment.

The previous call center system was not able to support multi-channel communication. Before there was possible that one agent was talking on a phone and received a chat request at the same time. The agent could not respond within SLA. The new contact center system provides INEA with complete distribution of all communication channels.

Time framework

INEA has known about new system needs for several years. In 2009 the company developed IT strategy for the whole company by 2018. At the turn of 2011 and 2012 INEA started searching for  a CRM system. This project still runs and the SAP Contact Center implementation is a part of it. The new CRM system will run productively by the new year beginning. The start of SAP CRM will also strengthen the effectiveness of SAP Contact Center. INEA decided to not to implement booth systems at the same time. The CRM configuration is complicated and must take time. SAP Contact Center was implemented according to the schedule.

Results

The new system gives completely new opportunities to manage incoming calls in the customer service center, provides agents scripts to facilitate their work and boosts business efficiency. The previous system was effective but there were problems with its stability. The SAP Contact Center architecture is designed for unlimited scalability and easily to be scalable. Of course, growing in user numbers requires expanding licenses. Licensing is based on the number of users.

SAP Contact Center reduces the time of each event with cl10-15 seconds just because it automatically opens customer’s files. Before the agent had to search it in the system. During first three months of production start there will be system-configuration-tuning.  INEA aims to the standard service level model which is 80/20.

Budget

Is SAP cheaper?

SAP Contact Center implementation costs are a small part of the total CRM budget in INEA. From the technical point of view it would be possible to integrate CRM with other contact center solutions however the costs of that integration would be significant. None of competitive contact center systems has such advantages as SAP Contact Center does that would justify such operation. The journalist asked if SAP was cheaper? Maciej Ziemiański said: “Licensing costs were very similar while the costs of implementation services widely divergent. For the benefit of SAP solution. We are talking about the whole implementation of the CRM system not only the call center suite.”