Jacada legacy integration solutions, available through CommerceQuest SA, have more than proven themselves in the customer relations and call centre arenas, as illustrated by two recent international implementations - one at RCI in the US and the other at Quick & Reilly.
"Resort Condominiums International (RCI) in the US is one of the world's largest timeshare service providers, with more than 3 500 timeshare resort affiliates in over 90 countries," says Alex Steyn, MD of local Jacada reseller CommerceQuest SA.
Every year, about 2 million timeshare exchanges are booked by RCI, sending more than 6 million people on vacation. To be able to book all these vacations, RCI employs more than 2 000 vacation counsellors worldwide. In its North American call centre located in Indianapolis, RCI employs more than 500 vacation counsellors.
"Training the staff and servicing the 1.3 million members who call the centre is an enormous feat. When RCI decided to build a new call centre -- Vacation Plaza -- the team working on the project wanted a state of the art facility with state of the art technology. The solution was the Jacada Interface Server, which allowed graphical access to the mainframe call centre application to reduce training costs, improve productivity and integrate with the existing telephony system. The bottom line is improved customer service at a lower cost," Steyn explains. Adding the graphical access to its call centre application provided RCI with a significant return on investment. Call length remained the same, but training-related costs were reduced approximately 25%.
"And instead of six months to become productive, new call centre personnel are now productive in just three months -- half the time that it took using the old system," says Steyn. She points out that not only mainframe systems, but also newer call centre systems can be integrated using Jacada technology.
"Quick & Reilly is probably one of the best examples of the use of Jacada with more recent technology to provide an overall solution," she says. Quick & Reilly, one of the US's largest and most successful brokerage firms, has built its business on providing customers with real-time investment and account information, as well as point-and-click securities trading. To remain ahead of its competition, Quick & Reilly began looking for ways to both ramp up its customer offering and automate much of its brokers' workload.
It chose Siebel Call Center, a Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) application that gives agents the ability to handle a complete set of service, support, and sales interactions and to provide quick and accurate problem resolution.
But to extract the most potential from the system, Quick & Reilly needed a way to integrate Siebel eBusiness Applications with its existing legacy ADP record-keeping and reporting system. Without that integration, Quick & Reilly's 500 brokers would have to undertake double-duty data entry into both systems each time a new customer account was added or updated. Worse yet, new customers - up to 600 accounts a day - might have to wait 24 hours to begin trading.
Jacada Integrator provided the group with a drag-and-drop implementation - and the endorsement of Siebel. With only a two-person team, one of which was a Jacada professional services consultant, the CRM project was implemented in a matter of days.
The Web trading project was also implemented in a very short time period. The Jacada Integrator promise of efficiency was realised immediately. With the automated synchronisation of Siebel, the Web sites, and ADP, transactional labour was cut significantly.
"Where once they were consumed by entering data, brokers are now able to dedicate their time to serving customers. Mutual Fund trades are processed seamlessly, and at a significantly lower error rate. Data integrity is strengthened because it is only entered into the system once, and all users have access to the same data sets," Steyn says.
Already a firm known for effective implementation of proven technology and process enhancements, Quick & Reilly's embrace of Jacada Integrator has brought unprecedented speed and accuracy to its customer transactions. While transparent to the end-user, the new system's ease and efficiency has gained the attention of the brokers as a business development tool, since data-entry transactional activities are being shifted over to call centre agents so brokers can now spend twice as much time on customer relationship, Steyn says.
"These two examples illustrate how well Jacada integration tools are suited to the call centre environment," Steyn says. "Although these are international examples, CommerceQuest is able to provide similar solutions. Through our reseller agreement with Jacada, we have both the technology and the know-how available to integrate call centre solutions locally."
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