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Telindus Triples Performance with Amdocs CES Smart Agent Desktop for Agile, High-Performance Worldwide Customer Support
Telindus Group NV, one of Europe's top ICT companies, provides internal and outsourced ICT support for service providers through 41 offices in 12 countries. The Amdocs Customer Management solution, including Amdocs Smart Agent Desktop and backed by the expertise of Amdocs Customer Management Professional Services, helps Telindus achieve optimal performance throughout its diverse, highly distributed organization and deliver ITIL-compliant service while keeping costs low. Looking ahead, the company's agile, efficient Amdocs infrastructure inspires the organization to further business innovation-and continued market leadership.
Telindus Group NV
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| Customer: |
Telindus Group NV
Subsidiary of Belgacom |
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| Market: |
Information & Communications Technology |
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| Headquarters: |
Brussels |
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| Website: |
www.telindus.be |
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| Ticker: |
Euronext Brussels: TEL |
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| Revenue: |
EUR 699 million (2006) |
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| Employees: |
2,753 |
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| Customers: |
Fortis; AxA; Ono; and more... | |
| Challenges |
- Increase performance and efficiency over a distributed internal and outsourced ICT environment
- Ensure agility and adaptability to support evolving business processes and strategies
- Control costs with a future-proof CRM infrastructure that grows with Telindus and insulates the company from changes in technology
- Achieve ITIL compliance to support CRM best practices
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| Solution |
- Take advantage of upgrade to the latest version of Amdocs CES CRM provided under existing maintenance agreement
- Implement Amdocs Smart Agent Desktop to improve performance and streamline configuration and customization
- Leverage Amdocs Customer Management Professional Services for extensive consultation on ways to improve business processes and optimally support them using Amdocs Smart Client technologies
- Leverage Amdocs Product Support for secure, responsive, and reliable product maintenance and support services
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| Results |
- Amdocs Smart Client architecture eliminated client-side bottlenecks and accelerated performance by nearly 3X
- Consistently fast response times regardless of server load
- Faster, more responsive case handling helps Telindus meet ITIL standards for CRM support and service level and operational level agreements with its clients
- Eliminates errors through drag-and-drop controls and links between the development framework and application server
- Development, troubleshooting, and debugging have been accelerated
- Enhanced technological agility inspires the organization to business innovation, knowing it can be supported easily
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| Technical Environment |
Amdocs Products:
- Amdocs Smart Agent Desktop
- Amdocs Customer Interaction Manager
- Amdocs Process Manager
- Amdocs Change Manager
- Amdocs SLA Manager
Amdocs Services:
- Amdocs Customer Management Professional Services
- Amdocs Product Support
Number of users: >1,500 total users
Interaction volume: > 200,000
Operating system: HP Itanium
Database: Oracle
Hardware: HP
Integrations: ERP; Tivoli Netcool network monitoring; Microsoft Analytic Services (BI); Bizztalk; Sonic MQ; Oblicore; Crossticketing via JSR091
Systems Integrator: Ideal Systems | | | | | |
| Telindus Group NV faces challenges familiar to any highly distributed service organization. One of Europe's leading information and communication technology (ICT) companies, Telindus provides ICT support to a customer base of blue-chip service providers—each with its own unique profile, support requirements, and service level agreements. A staff of more than 1,500 Telindus agents distributed throughout Europe uses a variety of network access methods to handle service interactions, making it both difficult and essential to achieve optimal technological performance, process efficiency, and strategic integration.
For nearly five years, Telindus has standardized on Amdocs Customer Management products to unify ticketing systems, reduce total cost of ownership and maintenance costs, and enable better customer service and support for international corporate customers. The choice of Customer Management Solution partners was a simple one. "As the industry's leading CRM offering, Amdocs provides superior functionality that addresses most of our needs out-of-the-box, as well as the flexibility and configurability to allow a truly customized solution," says Daniel Cauwenberghs, ICT Application Manager, Telindus.
To take its CRM capabilities to the next level of performance, adaptability, and scalability, Telindus launched a comprehensive upgrade of its Amdocs Customer Management system, including the migration of the application infrastructure from Web client to the new Amdocs Smart Client Framework. Following a consultation with Amdocs Customer Management Professional Services on how best to improve its business processes, and optimally implement and leverage Amdocs Smart Client technologies to support those processes, the company worked with Amdocs and Brussels-based system integrator Ideal Systems to migrate to the Amdocs CES Customer Management offering.
"Amdocs provides superior functionality that addresses most of our needs out-of-the-box, as well as the flexibility and configurability to allow a truly customized solution"
Daniel Cauwenberghs, ICT Application Manager, Telindus
Having already played a key role in supporting Telindus' current Amdocs solution, Ideal Systems drew on deep knowledge of the company's systems and processes as well as an excellent relationship with the Telindus user community to provide infrastructure management support for the migration.
The project included the implementation of various pre-existing customizations to the new platform—some performed with a migration tool developed by Amdocs Customer Management Professional Services, others handled manually. These included the ability to create a change request directly on the customer interaction home page, as well as multiple custom search screens. The extensive customizations in Telindus' existing Web client implementation of Amdocs Customer Interaction Manager presented an additional challenge; Amdocs Customer Management Professional Services leveraged direct communication with Amdocs developers to bring these customizations over to the Smart Agent Desktop, preserving the company's previous investment and ensuring continuity in the functionality presented to its users.
Laying a Foundation of Comprehensive, Integrated CRM Functionality
Amdocs CES now powers internal and outsourced ICT operations for Telindus—an upgrade provided at no additional cost under the company's current maintenance agreement—complemented by additional products from the Amdocs Customer Management offering, which extend its capabilities. Amdocs Customer Interaction Manager helps Telindus agents handle more interactions, more efficiently, and increase its first-call problem resolution rate through a Web-based, unified agent desktop which provides a single point of customer interaction and an integrated, 360-degree view of the customer. Information drawn from both front- and back-office systems, coupled with context-driven navigation and pre-built interaction topics, helps agents make the right decisions at the right time, and an intuitive interface enhances performance and productivity.
"We can maintain optimal performance even when many agents are using the system concurrently. This increased speed translates directly into improved agent productivity and enhanced customer service."
Amdocs Process Manager helps the company manage complex processes from beginning to end through advanced workflow, with a focus on ownership and accountability that helps ensure clear resolution of problems. As a result, Telindus is better able to meet its contractual obligations to customers and reduce penalties from missed service level agreements. When changes are made to one of the large networks Telindus manages on behalf of its customers, Amdocs Change Manager helps minimize their impact on the company's customers.
Integration extends the benefits of Telindus' Amdocs investment. Customer-related data in Telindus' ERP system is fed directly into the Amdocs via the Amdocs Integration Gateway product. A Web services component of Integration Gateway makes it possible for Telindus IT professionals using Tivoli Netcool to monitor customer networks and create a case in Telindus' Amdocs CRM system without leaving the Netcool application.
Amdocs Smart Client Framework Speeds Performance and Time to Market
The licenses for the Amdocs Web clients previously in use at Telindus provided for a free upgrade to the new Smart Agent Desktop—a move which paid dramatic benefits in performance. Based on Amdocs' next-generation Smart Client architecture, Smart Agent Desktop combines the efficient central management and robust configurability of a Web-based client with the fast network performance of a traditional client/server application. "Why did we go with Amdocs Smart Client? The answer is simple: performance, performance, performance," says Cauwenberghs. "Additionally, because we've eliminated the need to run our applications within a separate Web browser, we no longer need to worry about the potential impact of browser updates and security patches on our applications. We know they'll keep working as well tomorrow as they have today."
By eliminating client-side bottlenecks, Smart Agent Desktop performs almost three times faster than the Web-based client for nearly every transaction. "Because each transaction is handled more quickly, and communication between the client and server are optimized, we can maintain optimal performance even when many agents are using the system concurrently. This increased speed translates directly into improved agent productivity and enhanced customer service," reports Cauwenberghs. Faster, more responsive case handling helps Telindus meet ITIL standards for CRM support best practices. Compliance with service level agreements and operational level agreements has also improved, enabled by Amdocs SLA Manager. "The case handling with our customers is done in a much more professional way, as agents are able to respond quicker when customers have questions about their cases," says Cauwenberghs. A complete record of past interactions further enhances service by ensuring continuity; no matter which agent handles a customer interaction, they can immediately access and quickly review the customer's history, then get right to work on the current issue.
The ease of configuration and customization of the Smart Client Framework helps Telindus bring services to market more quickly. When a Telindus customer asks for an enhancement to an application to better support their business and customer experience, Telindus can use Amdocs to create customized forms that automatically inherit all the functionality of an existing out-of-the-box or customized form. This ‘inheritance' dramatically reduces the effort and time required to respond to business requirements. In addition to speeding development time, this capability encourages a more responsive and agile culture within the team maintaining the solution, who gain confidence that they can work quickly and efficiently to support creative ideas from the business. As a result, IT's focus can shift from simply maintaining existing solutions to actively developing leading-edge CES capabilities.
"The case handling with our customers is done in a much more professional way, as agents are able to respond quicker when customers have questions about their cases"
Leveraging Proven Expertise and Responsiveness with Amdocs Product Support
Telindus continues to benefit from its maintenance agreement, which provides secure, responsive and reliable product maintenance and support services through a dedicated Focal Point. Operating based on certified methodologies and with support options ranging from online services (such as case login and tracking and an online knowledgebase) to one-on-one interactions with account managers and support experts, Amdocs Product Support helps Telindus ensure consistent performance and business support for the Amdocs CES solution. A self-service support portal allows Telindus to create and update its own cases and track their resolution. "Between the self-service tools Amdocs provides and fast access to their highly qualified support professionals, we can quickly resolve any issues that come up in the course of daily operations. It's one more way Amdocs gives us complete confidence in the ability of our Amdocs Customer Management solutions to support our business," says Cauwenberghs.
Moving Ahead on a State-of-the-Art CRM Platform
Telindus continues to extend the value of its Amdocs investment. The company plans to expand the use of Process Manager to manage projects performed for its customers. Telindus will also expand its XML bridge to provide a more standardized approach to application integration.
By upgrading to the Amdocs CES portfolio and implementing the innovative Smart Client Framework to work throughout its distributed organization, Telindus enables agents across Europe to provide seamless, highly responsive service to its customers while reducing costs. As the highly competitive ICT market continues to develop, Amdocs' adaptability inspires innovation by business strategists who know that their CRM infrastructure will change and evolve in tandem with their needs.
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