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With its business expanding, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. needed a more efficient way to reach customers and partners when it came to enrolling them in training for the companys call center, customer relationship management and computer telephony integration software.
The staff of Genesys University Americas, the training organization at Genesys, was exchanging too many communications with customers trying to enroll in classes, according to Carol Shaffer, director of Genesys University Americas, in Daly City, Calif.
To automate what had been a manual process, Shaffer selected ViewCentral Inc.s Collaboration Management Solutions.
See eWEEK Labs review of ViewCentrals Collaboration Management Solutions.
Before Genesys implemented Collaboration Management Solutions, “we could have five to seven communications with a customer,” Shaffer said. “We were looking to cut down on the number of communications it took for a customer to register.”
Because most training took place at Genesys University Americas Daly City training site or at customers facilities, the Genesys University staff also wanted to improve how it managed resources, monitored expenses and generated meaningful reports.
Implementing ViewCentrals service took about two and a half months, according to Shaffer. This took a little longer than expected because of the time Genesys spent to develop a new project management process around class registration, which involved creating rules for the kinds of communications sent to customers during the registration process as well as the content of those communications.
Developing the project management process involved testing the ViewCentral system as well as developing specific rules about how the registration process should work. For example, the staff decided not to allow customers to cancel registration through the system, according to Shaffer. Setting up the system this way gives the staff a way to communicate directly with customers to try to save registrations.
Even with the changes to the companys process, Shaffer was pleased with the results. “We had a goal of having 75 percent of the registrations occur over the system. We were at 95 percent within the first couple of weeks,” she said.
The system allowed Genesys University staff to construct complex rules. For example, when a customer signs up and pays for a class using a purchase order, that customer receives an acknowledgment of registration, rather than confirmation. “When we receive payment either during or after registration, the customer then receives confirmation,” Shaffer said.
An important consideration for Shaffer when choosing ViewCentral was the companys responsiveness to feedback and feature requests. “Whenever we have feedback or find we need a new feature, they listen and put those features in when they make sense and respond quickly to customers,” Shaffer said.
For example, Genesys wanted the ability to search registrations based on region or sales representative. According to Shaffer, ViewCentral added the ability to search on those fields within two weeks of the companys request.
In terms of a return on investment, Shaffer said she hasnt formalized metrics yet. However, since implementing ViewCentral, she said, shes seen a 10 to 30 percent increase in revenues and a 40 to 50 percent increase in the productivity of Genesys University staff because they now have more time to spend on sales and marketing.