Background
The Spare Parts department of a recognized leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment to the semiconductor industry supports customers worldwide. The department’s Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) perform the following:
- Responding to incoming calls from customers
- Issuing price quotations and invoices
- Processing sales and service orders
- Coordinating shipment and delivery logistics of parts
Despite the similarities in functions performed from site to site, customer service was delivered differently across different countries and regions. The North America Customer Service center operated 24/7, and handled after-hours calls routed from Singapore. China, France, Italy, Korea, and Taiwan routed their after-hours calls to a designated on-call CSR equipped with a cell phone and a laptop with network access capabilities. Japan allowed its largest customers to call the warehouse directly after hours.
In the beginning, Asia accounted for 60% of the client’s Spare Parts revenues, with the remaining 40% split relatively evenly between Europe and North America. The client’s management believed that Asia would continue to provide the majority of both new orders and of revenue.
The Challenge
- Though Asia is a rapidly growing market, the client’s Asia infrastructure was not well suited to delivering the high level of support customers required.
- Significant costs were associated with maintaining the status quo:
- If the client could not respond quickly to emergency calls involving machine failure and production slow-downs, the financial impact to its customers could be very large.
- The client’s inability to respond would also impact customer perception of the company and its services.
- Spare Parts is a high-margin business, and the client management team was concerned about the entry into the market of second-source vendors. Combating this trend required the client to increase its level of service while controlling costs to enable competitive pricing.
- Because staffing cost vary significantly from region to region, the solution would need to focus on providing superior 24/7 customer service while leveraging resources from regions with lower labor costs.
The Solution
- IPI developed a solution that combined business process changes with improved technology. IPI evaluated technology from three vendors around key benefits, ROI, key risks, and mitigating factors, and recommended a Sophisticom/Apropos hosted services solution.
- This telephony solution included the following features:
- Intelligent call routing
- Scalable architecture
- Standard reporting
- Toll-free service (in North America)
- The ability to add functionality such as call monitoring, multi-media queuing, interactive voice response (IVR), and computer telephony integration (CTI).
- In particular, intelligent call routing was instrumental to meeting the client’s needs because it allowed flexible call routing based on factors such as time of day, number dialed, customer calling and least-cost provider of service.
- The IPI team also recommended implementing reporting capabilities that would make it possible to measure the success of the solution including:
- Calls offered
- Calls accepted
- Calls abandoned
- Average wait time
- Average Handle time
- After-hours calls routed to a live CSR
- After-hours calls routed to voice mail
The Results
- Services and Spare Parts orders and the revenues associated with them have significantly increased.
- Client has been able to reduce staffing in more expensive regions while increasing the use of staff where the same functions can be performed more cost-effectively.
- Customers in Europe are able to dial into the client Global Spares operation and hear a script in the language they speak.
- Successful deployment in nine countries including North America, Europe and Asia.
- Client experienced significant costs savings as well as increased business without increasing their operational staff.
