Bytes Document Solutions (BDS) has announced a revamp of its Xerox service centre, born out of the integrated service approach the company has implemented in its managed print services (MPS) portfolio. The approach ties its service centre, field service, sales and office teams together to provide the most value to customers.
The overhaul began with the appointment of Werner Britz, a specialist in call centre environments, as manager of the Xerox integrated service centre.
Next was the rollout of Astea’s service lifecycle management solution. Astea is the information backbone that provides actionable data that is accessible to service centre staff in the office and technicians in the field. The result is improved efficiencies and productivity.
Lastly, the culture and processes were developed to focus entirely on the customers’ perspective. ‘Our priority is to provide a world class service experience to our customers by integrating Xerox Service Manager (our pro-active monitoring system) with incident management software from Astea,’ said Britz. ‘We further implemented a number of centralised Information technology library infrastructure-aligned services with live monitoring and management reports per function, which provides full visibility and control of our service environment. We are now realising the benefits of seamless continuity, reporting and measurement of every interaction around the country.’
It was crucial to develop the right set of key performance indicators to ensure that the focus remains on the important factors, especially from the customers’ view. The numbers recorded by each unit within the service centre speak for themselves. The service centre, which receives a combined 9230 phone calls every month, has drastically improved its performance and customer satisfaction culture. Over the last six months, an average of only 1.6% of calls were abandoned, compared to 22.3% previously. What’s more, an impressive 94% of calls are answered within 30 seconds.
Incident management staff have reported a service level agreement (SLA) performance achievement improvement from 57% to an average of 93%, from an average of 4 500 service calls and 438 installations per month. In addition, the average number of outstanding service calls dropped from 352 per day to 201.
For MPS, proactive monitoring has improved SLA achievement by almost 15% – from 81.3% per month to 96%, based on an average of 13,300 alerts every month. The proactive monitoring capability allows the service centre to remotely keep an eye on print devices in terms of consumable replenishment, service calls, device downtime and reports on operating performance, status, supply level, page counts and more.
These vastly improved customer satisfaction levels have led to a spike in the number of devices under MPS asset administration. In just one year, the number as grown from 6457 to 8210.
‘For a company like Bytes Document Solutions, service is strategic,’ said Britz. ‘Having a connected and intelligent solution that gives us the insight and capability to manage information, people and processes has been the key improvement in our services business. Astea has provided this; it drives up customer satisfaction, which improves our competitive advantage, top-line revenue and profitability.’
To reward the service centre staff and ensure they feel valued and motivated, BDS instituted the Quarterly Awards. The winners so far this year have been: Bonisile Kunene and Thulani Ngcobo (System Administration And Incident Management); Sifiso Khoza and Sinethemba Phakathi (Inbound Client Contact Centre) and Maria Mokgoetsi (MPS Client Contact Centre) – Mokgoetsi has won this award twice.
The result of all the hard work is a service centre that is on par with the international Xerox call centres in Europe, and a world-class service infrastructure that BDS can proudly sell to customers.
