Dimension Data this week announced the establishment of the Merchants i-Commerce Centre - South Africa`s first full-service interactive customer management facility. To be launched early in 2000, the facility combines traditional call centre services with fax, email, cellular and Internet enabled customer management.
Appointed to head up this new business venture as managing director of Merchants SA is Adam Craker, previously Associate Partner at Andersen Consulting.
Says Craker: "As reported in the Merchants annual Benchmarking Report, the rate of increase in demand for direct customer management services in South Africa exceeds the rate of increase in the UK and Europe. We intend to address this requirement with an initial capacity of 150 customer agent seats, with the intention to double this to 300 seats by May 2001."
According to Craker, running a successful customer management operation requires skills and experience in people, processes and technology. "Organisations do not necessarily want to develop in-house competency to recruit, train and manage customer management staff for direct channels. Neither do they want the responsibility of sourcing and implementing best practices, or keeping up with the latest technologies."
Outsourcing customer management requirements is an attractive option to organisations not wanting to invest in the necessary headcount, and preferring to concentrate on their core business. It also provides flexibility if the organisation is not yet able to forecast future customer service demand - particularly when entering a new market sector.
A specialist customer management organisation, Merchants boasts 18 years` experience in customer management practices. Merchants currently operates five customer management centres with a total of over 1 500 seats in the UK and Ireland, and expects its European capacity to increase beyond 2 000 seats by May 2000.
The company provides customer management services to a variety of industries in Europe, with clients covering cellular, digital TV, retail, utilities, software and financial services. As an example, Virgin has entered the UK market as the fifth cellular operator. Merchants provided a turnkey call centre solution for Virgin Mobile in six months from start to finish and now operates this facility of up to 500 seats for Virgin. It is anticipated that Virgin will gain 800 000 customers in the first year and that the call centre operation will grow to over 1000 seats by 2001.
"Merchants customer service success stories are extensive," says Ken Wheeler, managing consultant, Merchants SA. "For example, the service provided to printer manufacturer Tektronix spans multiple languages and countries - we have 24 customer agents that service 43 countries in 10 languages for Tektronix."
In the UK, Wheeler led the establishment of Wall`s Direct - another success story in exceptional customer management (Wall`s is part of Unilever). Through the Merchants customer management centre in the UK, Wall`s Direct have the ability to contact their 60 000 retailers in just 3 days to proactively manage demand for their product according to weather forecasts which affect ice-cream consumption.
The first Merchants i-Commerce Centre in South Africa is situated in Sandton, Johannesburg, with state-of-the-art environmental design, high capacity infrastructure and the most robust and functional customer management and multi-media technologies. Says Craker: "We have spared no expense in ensuring that both environmentally and technically, the Merchants i-Commerce Centre is exceptional."
The technologies chosen include front office applications such as Siebel, Genesys as the call telephony platform, based on Lucent products, including unified messaging and Blue Pumpkin as the resource management and reporting tool. The call centre infrastructure runs on a 1 Gbit/second backbone network and fully supports Voice Over IP technology. According to Craker, the chosen technologies are not only the best in their categories, but also mirror Dimension Data`s offerings to customers. "We intend our facility to be an outstanding showcase for a Dimension Data customer management solution."
Merchants is one of four business units within the recently launched Dimension Data i-Commerce business, which has as part of its core competency, significant skills and experience in integrating call centre capability with the enterprise.
"With the technical muscle of the Dimension Data group behind us, coupled with the vast experience of Merchants in Europe, Merchants SA is well positioned to provide an outstanding customer management service to local organisations," says Craker.
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