The Company
Number Nine Visual Technology provides PC-based graphics display solutions.
A publicly held company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, Number Nine
has more than 130 employees, and offices in California, Germany, and Japan.
The Problem
For several years, Number Nine relied on a Centrex-based telecommunications
system to support more than 40 full-time agents working in the sales and
customer-support departments. To handle the numerous incoming sales and
customer-service calls received daily, the company used an Automatic Call
Distributor (ACD) to distribute calls uniformly among the agents. The ACD's lack
of flexibility, however, caused in-house MIS engineers to be less than
satisfied. The ACD was difficult to control, and when the company shut it down
at the end of the day, the engineers often weren't sure whether callers in the
queue were being disconnected.
The Solution
Looking for a truly flexible solution, Number Nine began to evaluate
alternative call-center solutions. It chose the network-based Distributed Call
Center from Teloquent Communications.
With Distributed Call Center, the sales manager and technical support
supervisor have monitors that give them realtime reports about how many people
are in the queue. This capability lets them make decisions about how many people
need to staff the phones during certain time periods. The Distributed Call
Center also lets the company identify and analyze improvement areas. For
example, reports indicated that 2.5 percent of calls were lost. The company
analyzed why these calls were lost so that it could make improvements.
Another important feature for Number Nine is the product's skills-based
routing feature, which IVR makes possible. The company's products operate on a
variety of computing platforms, so this feature offers a distinct advantage
because it can route a technical support call to the agent most familiar with a
specific OS or platform.
This feature also helped Number Nine with an unexpected problem. To counter
extreme weather conditions one winter, the company routed calls to agents who
were snowed in at home. The company was able to provide customers with technical
support during a time when the majority of companies in the region were closed.
In the near future, Number Nine plans to move its technical support
department to Burlington, Massachusetts, while keeping the sales department in
Lexington. As the result of Distributed Call Center's flexibility, the company
will be able to seamlessly network both locations.
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