sci case icis 2008 - california state university channel...

SUPPORT CENTER, INC. (A)Sue Conger

University of Dallas

Abstract

Support Center, Inc. is a Call Center that conducts collections activity for its client companies. SCI has suffered several outages over the last year that worry the new CIO. The company has many IT issues to be addressed but continuity planning appears to be one that can be a 'quick win.' What should SCI do for continuity planning and how much should it spend?

Keywords: ITIL, IT Service Management, Call Center, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Telecomm Management

Introduction

Support Center, Inc. (SCI) is a $400 million, 190-person call center that operates two

shifts Monday through Friday and half days on Saturday. The Chief Information Officer (CIO)

of the company, Bob Wentworth, is a new employee in charge of technology planning,

deployment, and management. Bob's job is to bring SCI's technology up to date and help them

learn to better manage the phenomenal growth the company has experienced in the last two

years. As Bob delved into the company's problems, he realized that the changes needed would

be long term in development but that the company was suffering outages from which it had slow

recoveries. Bob decided that continuity planning for both the company and the IT organization

were needed, yet the issue of what to do and how much to spend required further analysis

SCI History

SCI is the amalgamation of three call center companies that each had its own area of

expertise: Somerfield, Inc., Charleston & Associates, and Telecomm Sales, Inc. Somerfield,

Inc., the largest of the three and the company founded by Charles Somerfield, the President and

Chairman of SCI, is a call center in the business of collecting past due accounts for companies in

the telecommunications industry. The Somerfield call center performed what are called 1st Party

collections, during which the Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) act as employees of the

telecomm company and follow scripts to collect the funds owed. CSRs are paid a salary with

Copyright 2008, Sue Conger

bonuses as they reach various collection plateaus. The bonuses are considered incentives and to

reach plateaus requires constant success in collections efforts.

Charleston & Associates is a collections agency that collected 90-day and older accounts

of any type. In the SCI environment, the CSRs are referred to as 3rd Party collectors. Third party

CSRs do not follow a script and are allowed to use any legal and ethical means to collect money.

However, there is no regulation of this industry and the means are rarely questioned, especially

when the amounts collected are substantial. CSRs in this industry tend to be paid completely on

commission that is a percentage of the funds they collect.

Telecomm Sales, Inc. was owned by James Ingles before the merger and is the third

company on which SCI is based. Telecomm is a 1st Party selling organization that sold products,

such as magazine subscriptions, via sales calls that were guided by scripts. Problems in this

segment of the SCI business forced it to exit this market several months ago. At the time it is

discontinued, selling accounted for 15% of sales but 30% of Call Center cost.

The companies merged two years ago as the owners were all friends who felt the

synergies of the combined companies would be more profitable than the separate companies.

However, that expectation has not happened. Operational issues, some of which relate to IT, are

perceived as keeping the new company from realizing expected benefits. Bob Wentworth, the

new CIO, had an illustrious Fortune 100 career as Chief Information Officers (CIO) and call

center manager with over 4000 employees. As CIO, Bob's charge was to help the company better

integrate its technology to become a strategic asset.

The merged SCI organization has had six CIOs in its two-year existence. The

Information Technology organization (IT) is believed to be out of control because each CIO,

upon being hired, had declared serious issues that they would then be unable to improve within

three months of their hiring thus leading to their subsequent dismissal. Bob's first task is to

assess the state of technology, determine the most serious shortcomings, develop a plan to fix

them, and then begin the remediation.

Organization

SCI is a casually run organization with no formal organization chart; the diagram in Figure 1

depicts the organization structure as described by Bob Wentworth. In general, the major staff

included the owner, Charles Summerfield and his partners Jim Charleston and Jim Ingles, Garth

Esterby, the CFO, who

manages corporate finance

and oversees accounting and

IT. Anne Paige manages

accounting receivables with

four people and payables

with two people. Bob

Wentworth is the CIO with

about 20 people in IT.

Gary Jones, the Marketing

Manager, along with his staff

of two and all of the partners, develop business and sell SCI services. Janice Barnes, VP of

Human Resources, is responsible for a staff of four who hire, fire, and administer benefits.

Payroll is outsourced. HR is an important job at SCI because they experience about 180%

turnover in the call center annually. Barnes reports to Ingles.

James Charleston managed the Call Center and Client Services. Arlette Johnson is the manager

of Customer Service. Once a sale is made, it is serviced and monitored by the 20-person

Customer Service staff. Steve McHenry manages the Call Center. Steve manages about 190

customer service representatives (CSRs) and supervisors during a 15-hour workday.

The Call Center

The Call Center is organized into two groups for 1st- party and 3rd- party collections

(explained below). The day shift is the larger of the two with 140 customer service

representatives (CSRs) working four to eight hours each. Ninety CSRs work the second shift.

The 1st party CSRs are grouped into four teams, three teams for each of the major clients'

campaigns. All four teams support all other clients. The three largest clients provide about 70%

of the billings while the other 1,800 clients provide the remaining 20% of the billings.

IT outages are immediately noticeable in the Call Center where 15 minutes of downtime

is considered a significant problem.

Start of DayAt the beginning of the day, the Dialer Administrator (DA), Juan, initiates operation for

the Davox dialer call dialer system. Juan downloads client campaign information (client

payables) via file transfer protocol (FTP) from the SCI web site queuing them for processing

each day. The Davox is initialized and the campaign information named and stored in

anticipation of collection processing. Campaign information includes client ID (e.g., Indiana

Cable Company would be InCaCo), campaign ID (e.g., 120307 for December, 2007 accounts

over 60-days old), customer ID (e.g., the account number for the InCaCo customer being called),

the customer's name, phone, amount past due, past due date, and number of days past due.

Clients each have from 1,000 to 100,000 customer accounts that are in arrears and are to be

called by SCI. The DA loads from one to ten campaigns per team at a time, releasing them from

the queue as another campaign completes its cycle.

Occasionally, about once a month, Juan will forget that he has already processed a

campaign and he overlays it with either the same one or another of the same campaign ID.

When that happens, any moneys collected under the old name and all records of those collections

are no longer accessible. If the error is identified before the close of that day's business, Dennis

McCardle in IT uses a utility to recreate the lost campaign, as best he can. To recreate the

campaign payment records requires identification of the error before end of day processing

during which records for the day are archived.

When a new campaign is contracted, Steve gives campaign information to the DA

verbally. The DA then creates a spreadsheet to 'tick off' the campaigns as they are loaded into

the Davox, processed, and filtered as required. Once campaigns are loaded, the DA sets the

timing for each campaign and CSR work can begin. To begin CSR collections, Lyricall software,

which serves up dialogue and customer information screens, is loaded into the Davox and begins

processing.

The DAs learn their job through on-the-job training by another DA. There is no

documentation for the job, no written processes, and no Davox documentation. When Davox-

related problems occur, about once every two months, Dennis McCardle in IT is called.

CSR LogonTo begin an agent session, a CSR logs onto his/her PC, then logs on to a campaign. If

CSRs forget to logon to the campaign, they will not get credit (or pay) for their collections as

they cannot be tied back to the person making the collection. There is no way for the application

to verify that an agent is logged on to a campaign.

Once on the system, CSRs are routed incoming, outgoing, or both types of phone calls

based on Davox call activity. There are approximately two seconds between calls when the

dialer and incoming activity are both busy, there may be as much as 15 minutes between calls

when they are not busy.

CollectionsThe Call Center performs both 1st and 3rd party collections. The 1st Party process relates

to services provided when CSRs act as if they are employees of the company. For instance, they

answer incoming calls, "Good morning, this is Stacy at [client company name], how may I help

you?"

First Party clients are serviced via both incoming and outgoing phone calls, and are

provided two types of services: Collections of past-due bills, and regular Customer Service for

which they answer questions such as, client hours of operation, payment locations, or product

specifications and functions.

The CSR answers a call, determining from a Lyricall script (served from the Davox)

whether it is payment or service related. Then the CSR verbally validates that the person owing

money is on the phone; this is called a 'right-party contact' or (RPC). If it is not an RPC, the

process changes. If it is an RPC, the agent discusses the past-due amount and seeks to collect the

money. Once a result is reached, the CSR enters a call result and the process is continued. A

collection call results in one of the following results: Dispute, refuse to pay, previous payment,

no payment, payment, or promise-to-pay.

Third-party collections are similar to 1st party collections in that the goal is to collect

past-due monies. But, there also are many important differences between 1 st and 3rd party

collections that also are the source of some problems. One noticeable difference between 3 rd

party and 1st party is in the complexity of payment processing. There are different processes for

credit card, direct check, promise-to-pay, no payment, and wrong-party calls. As a result, the

logon processes are the same but 3rd party uses no scripts to conduct the dialog and must

manually open and close screens that are automatic during the 1st party process. Third party

CSRs have no scripts and thus must raise all screens manually. This is another source of

problems. Third party CSRs bypass some screens, creating their own processes and violating

company policy in the bargain. These personalized processes result in partial payment posting

and inconsistencies between the several files that store payment information.

The different payment tactics bring some complexities to light. The Lyricall and Davox

software work together to provide 1st party scripts (as appropriate), record termination codes, and

update Davox-based client call files with customer contact outcomes. SCI's own customer files

on the AS/400 are updated for people who had been called in the past and add records for new

people. The AS/400 files are created after the Davox transaction completes as a way to double

check payment processing in event of Davox Call File errors. These AS/400 file updates require

all CSRs to manually open a new window for updating and are not part of the Davox Lyricall

process. An average eight-second delay in opening this customer file delays the collection

process and annoys the CSRs. Some CSRs work too fast for the AS/400 process to compute and

store the data and result in partial or unstored transactions.

Three large customers have transactions sent to their A/R systems to log payments real-

time. Delays for Internet, client network, and/or client applications cause annoyance to the CSRs

who don’t always wait for this subprocess to complete.

Screen opening for credit card and direct check transactions is successful for only about

95% of transactions, but the software gives no status back to indicate what the problem is. As a

result, CSRs kept their own manual list of calls, customer names, and payments collected to

ensure the accuracy of their commissions. A fair amount of discrepancy between company,

client, and CSR records exists, as do discrepancies between the Davox and AS/400 records.

End of DayTo end a day, all CSRs log off of their campaigns and the Davox is shut down

IT Organization

The IT organization chart is shown in Figure 2. There are three, two and two staff in

each of Special Projects, Financial Apps, and Operations, respectively. Two employees have

been at SCI with Summerfield since before the merger: Dennis McCardle and Pat Andrews.

Dennis is the key support person for the Call Center and had been CIO #5 of the six prior CIOs.

He is still at SCI because he is Summerfield’s son-in-law. Dennis supported all of Operations,

the Call Center, client upload and script creation, and the SCI web site. He had two operators

reporting to him.

While all IT staff are

intensive computing users,

none of the projects is critical

enough that an outage would

cause a significant problem.

The IT area could be without

computing resources for a

week, if needed, before a

problem became critical. The

most important purpose of the

IT organization is to keep the

Call Center functioning.

IT Operations

Davox is known as a predictive dialer hardware/software configuration. A predictive

dialer is a combination of hardware and software that makes, monitors, and routes phone calls to

call agents. Prediction works by adjusting the calling process to the number of agents it predicts

will be available when the calls it places are predicted to be answered. CSR talk time can

increase from 20 or fewer minutes an hour to over 50 minutes an hour by using predictive dialing

equipment versus having agents place their own calls.

Once an incoming call is answered by the Davox (or an outgoing call is validated as

having a person on the other end), customer information is retrieved and the call is transferred to

a CSR for processing. If the call detects an answering machine, disconnect, TeleZapper, etc. the

call is terminated without being passed to an agent. Terminated calls are marked for retry at a

later time.

Davox gets incoming calls from two directly connected, T-1 trunk lines. Outbound calls

are made by a Siemens switch, which can determine the lowest rate from among seven long-

distance vendors. The Davox has an outbound capability but it is not used as it cannot determine

the line to use by rate. The Davox reads customer records to obtain phone numbers and passes

the numbers to the Siemens.

The Davox tracks agent activity at a detailed level to allow management reporting for

various measures, for instance talk time, idle time, average answer time for incoming calls,

incoming hand-ups, and average calls waiting. Agents can track their own work and first-line

supervisors can monitor CSR calls to verify quality and track agent activity throughout the day.

In addition, supervisors get paper reports on agent activity by campaign, time period, and type of

activity.

Several outages have affected the entire company over the last year. The Davox suffers

outages about twice per year for 1-2 days. Further, there are no manuals or reference materials

on the Davox available in the organization. The Siemens switch suffers outages approximately

once per year of two days. Davox and Siemens outages are corrected and managed by the

vendors. Even though there are contracts calling for one-day support for problems, in all cases,

the support has been provided on the second day of the outages.

Web Site outages for the client upload/download software occur approximately twice a

year. The last outage had lasted one week and cost the company several clients. Other parts of

the web site rely only on HTML and have not suffered outages.

Although the Davox has dialer capabilities, it is used only for its predictive dialer

software. The Siemens switch actually makes the calls and hands them off to the Davox. There

are 200 CSR seats for Lyricall support, which runs on the Davox. The Davox and Siemens both

generate statistics on call, hang-up, lost calls, and other types of call activity but the statistics

differ from slight to substantial discrepancies, depending on other circumstances.

Davox files have been lost occasionally and clients affected were not billed for the month

of that occurrence. That event prompted the three levels of backup for collections activity and

the use of additional screens for entering payments in the SCI Customer File on the AS/400.

Dennis is aware of the problem with the AS/400 freezing occasionally during a payment

process and with the problem of direct check screen requests going unfulfilled. He believes that

a recently departed programmer, Van, had fixed both problems before he left but he has no tests

or proof of the fixes.

There is no reconciliation of individual customer records updated per day or month

because Dennis uses an automated program that is not checked if it runs to a normal end.

The data center configuration is presented below in Figure 3 (Click to see larger diagram).

Some issues with hardware are the

following:

1. Siemens Switch

6 shelves are now configured; addition of 2 more shelves is scheduled.

The Siemens switch is connected to four long distance carriers from which it selects the cheapest call rate call by location called, by time of day, and by day of month.

2. Davox

The equipment is aging but there are no plans to replace or evaluate replacement hardware or software to support Call Center operations. (See Figure 3)

Davox cannot provide least cost routing – therefore, this capability is set up to dial through the Siemens switch.

Davox cannot handle “blaster” calls (one message to many recipients).

SCI currently has 150 agent licenses and is near capacity.

There is one Compose-IT PC (used to create Lyricall scripts) in the computer room; its backup is in the Call Center and is managed by the Dialer Administrator.

There is no documentation and no backup of Davox and Lyricall software.

3. One server is used for downloading from the web site. It has no backup but uses off-the-shelf software.

4. Long Distance is provided by 10 long distance T1 lines from Quest and WorldCom. The two other long distance vendors have slower service.

While the Call Center relies almost completely on the Davox-Siemens equipment and the

SCI Web site, the rest of the company relies on the AS/400 system for their applications and

support. Software is centralized on the AS/400 so that PCs are treated as dumb terminals.

Everyone has MS Office installed on their local PCs. EMail is through Lotus Notes and the few

applications – Accounting, Customer Accounts (regardless of Client), Time Keeping, and query

processing (using DB2 database) are on the AS/400. The AS/400 configuration is connected to a

Web server, and directly cabled to two concentrators for communications to the company's PCs.

There are no spare parts for this equipment. Backup of critical files is performed nightly after

the nightly Davox process ends. Off-site storage is provided through Iron Mountain Services.

The AS/400 is at least seven years old but has been very reliable with no major breakdowns in

six years. A contracted company performs preventive maintenance on the recommended IBM

schedule.

Description AS/400 Davox Siemens (switch)

Age Exact date unknown. More than seven years.

Davox - 8+ years. Compose-It (software) server (used to develop Lyricall scripts) since October, 2004.

Exact date unknown. More than seven years.

Software - languages RPG Proprietary database. Access to SQL is through Compose It that replicates Davox data.

INFORMIX

Database DB2 Sybase INFORMIX

Figure 4. SCI Systems and Database Query Capabilities

Customer Service

Customer Service is charged with being the official communications arm of SCI once a

contract is signed. The organization is managed in four teams of five CSRs each. Each team is

assigned approximately 400 clients who they call monthly to verify that they are satisfied with

SCI’s service. Their main task is providing phone support to clients for which, telephone access

is critical. Many of the Customer Services CSRs use Excel spreadsheets to track their activity

and make sure each client is treated the same.

The Customer Service CSRs all use computers to access client information, retrieve

reports, and input customer contacts to personal spreadsheets. These CSRs have no access to Call

Center applications or Davox system. Everything the Customer Service CSRs do is serviced

from the AS/400 sytem. If pressed, the CSRs could go without computing access for about ½

day before their jobs would be impacted.

Marketing

The Marketing organization does not use computers except as they are used in computing

and formatting contracts. It is a ‘traditional’ marketing group so that the country is divided into

territories and each marketer sells within his/her territory. The partners get involved with large

potential customers as ‘closers.’

The impact of IT outages on this group is negligible. When in the office, the marketers

rely on phone and email to access clients. If required, client access and contracts could be

developed on home PCs. However, no one currently has contract templates backed up on home

computers.

Accounting

Accounting is a computer-intensive organization since all data on which they rely is

computerized. However, they work from downloads to Excel and could go as long as a week

without actually accessing the AS/400 if needed. Accounting works on a monthly cycle during

which they spend the first 10 days of the month closing SCI's books, then they run initial

monthly invoices for clients and begin the reconciliation process of Davox vs. Client vs. AS/400

records. In a typical month this process takes about one week so that client bills are mailed

around the 21st of the month. To guarantee cash flow, an estimated bill is sent on the 1st of the

month.

Reconciliation highlights some of the problems with the computing environment.

Reports of all Call Center activity are generated from the Siemens for call volumes, the Davox

for CSR statistics and collections, and the AS/400 for collections backup (when CSRs wait for

the screens to load). However, the reports all give a different picture of Call Center activity.

Theoretically, the Davox, through which all call activity flows, and the Siemens should have

identical numbers for outbound activity. However, they count activity differently. For instance,

the Siemens counts all dial attempts, counting by answer type. Since the Siemens cannot

identify right party contacts, this automatically results in a discrepancy. Also, if campaigns are

overlaid whether or not the problem is caught, discrepancies occur between the Siemens and

Davox counts. In addition, if campaigns overlays are not caught, discrepancies in collected

amounts occur between the Davox and AS/400. For the largest three clients, SCI’s system sends

transaction records to the client A/R software to provide real-time accounting for collections.

With overlaid campaigns, the amounts collected can become irreconcilable.

A different problem relates to the reports generated. AS/400 reports are listed as

collections, by client, by date, by customer. Davox reports are listed by client, by campaign, by

date, by customer. Reports from the Siemens are listed by date by type of outcome. These

differences result in required reconciliation that, even with no errors in processing, no overlaid

campaigns, and no lost transactions, is a non-trivial, time-consuming activity. The problem

appears to be that the skill set of the IT personnel assigned to query support is not sufficient to

provide for a depth of understanding of client needs that would allow them to generate reports

that meet the Accounting Departments needs.

Thus, once monthly reports are run, data is moved to Excel for all further Accounting

processing. Depending on the outage type and time of month, Accounting may/not be affected

noticeably. On average, Accounting could do all work from daily renditions of the monthly

reports if required. Thus, Accounting could go about two to four weeks before an outage became

severe.

Executives

SCI executives differ substantially in their use and understanding of computers. Garth,

the CFO, is computer literate and uses MS Office products all day. He knows the general

architecture of applications for the company but has no understanding of what might be, how to

remedy any of the problems, or even the extent of the problems facing the Call Center, IT,

accounting, or the company.

The partners: James C., James, I, and Charles, all are essentially computer illiterate.

They can do rudimentary email but cannot attach documents or download documents. They

have mostly chauffeured computer use with their executive assistants pre-reading and screening

emails, printing downloaded documents, and providing whatever computing is needed. James C.

and Charles both are basic users of MS Excel but feel that MS Word is a secretary’s job. Thus,

the executives have a ‘traditional’ view of both IT and male-female roles in the organization.

Continuity Planning

There is currently no continuity planning at SCI. The IT Department also has no disaster

recovery (or IT continuity) plan. The company is currently experiences 6-10 days of outages per

year with one instance per year of an outage that lasts at least one week. As a result of these

outages, SCI has lost customers and suffered service level contract fines for customers that did

not leave the company.

Bob Wentworth sees many issues that need improvement in the way IT services are

structured, managed, and delivered as SCI. Knowing that most of the changes will take one-two

years to effect the desired change, Bob wants to develop both business and IT continuity plans to

deal with future outages while he addresses longer-term issues. In anticipation of the continuity

exercise, SCI estimates that $1.1 million is lost every 15-hour workday of lost collections. This

translates to about $75,000 loss per Call Center work hour.

The key issues to be decided include:

Identifying the key risks Estimating costs of different types of outages Developing mitigations for as many risks as possible Defining how much to spend on continuity Developing a policy for business and IT continuity.

sci case icis 2008 - california state university channel...

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