Vertex Case Study Introduction In just 5 years, Vertex has grown to become one of the UK's largest Business Process Outsourcers specialising in customer management. The company's annual revenues are in excess of £300 million (approx $450 million); it employs over 8,000 people, and is a part of United Utilities plc. Vertex provides Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services to an impressive list of clients including Cable & Wireless, Birmingham City Council, Companies House, Littlewoods Bet Direct and Marks & Spencer Direct. Vertex's offerings range from the provision of simple overflow telephony services through telemarketing to the management of outsourced large-scale end-to-end customer-service operations. In 2001 Vertex managed over 11 million customers on behalf of its clients. Vertex focuses on maximising the value of its clients' customers, increasing productivity and reducing the cost per customer interaction through the application of both innovative working practices and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology. In fact, Vertex prides itself on offering its clients cutting edge technology alongside gold-standard customer service. These requirements and drivers clearly explain why Vertex chose to work with Amacis to provide compelling services to its customer base. Project Background As more people want to communicate via e-mail and the web to conduct their business, Vertex's clients, in common with most businesses, increasingly need to respond to their own customers' demands for communication across these channels. Consequently, they have looked to Vertex, as a leader in BPO, to provide services in this area as well. Vertex recognised that there was a business opportunity in e-mail handling and needed to identify the technology that would enable them to execute this. In 1999 Vertex chose an early e-mail management product. The key objectives for this project were to enable Vertex to add additional revenue-generating services to deal with increasing customer demand to manage electronic traffic alongside voice, while avoiding disproportionately increased staffing costs. It was also important to be able to bring new clients on board faster with as little set-up resource and effort as possible. Unfortunately, the product did not live up to its expectations. The main problems that Vertex faced with their previous e-mail management system were: • A large amount of staff time was required to respond manually to messages as more than 70% of incoming messages did not have an automatic suggestion made with the existing software due to the free format nature of the e-mails. • A lot of management and system administrator time was being wasted setting up and maintaining complex and unwieldy manual rules on the incumbent system. • Hardware costs would be increasing as each customer had to be installed on a separate system, as the software did not support multiple partitions. • Frequent downtime and poor supplier support. • Staffing costs were predicted to be higher for each client as the lack of automation of the software meant that e-mails were not auto-suggested and had to be handled manually. • Inability to pull information from CRM and other back end systems to populate responses caused by a lack of integration facility. Because of this, and demand from their clients for e-mail support alongside telephony, Vertex decided to seek a more suitable e-mail management system provider. Vertex identified the following key drivers: • Demand from their clients for this service. • Vertex needed to be able to guarantee a reliable and efficient service. • To use the best technology as a competitive edge in a rapidly expanding market. Including the ability to: - have new clients up and running quickly and efficiently, - improve client and end-customer service at reduced cost, - support more customers with less resource, both managerial and operational, - provide future support for "new" channels. Vertex Case Study "Out of the 20 or so major projects that Vertex has undertaken this year, the Amacis Visibility implementation has possibly been the most successful. The speed of delivery was outstanding, and it was delivered within our budget." Dave Clarke, Technology Enablement General Manager, Vertex Ltd. Product Selection Vertex evaluated a number of well-known e-mail management products and vendors against its requirements. The principal evaluation criteria were: • Speed of solution deployment, • Ability to manage and support multiple customers in separate business areas on a single system, • Easy to set up and maintain rule base, • Accuracy of message classification, • Reduced managerial and operational costs, • Scalability to manage future volumes, • Integration with existing infrastructure and other solutions. Over a very short period of time Amacis was able to demonstrate that Amacis Visibility met every single criterion more effectively than the other vendors. After assessing Vertex's business needs, Amacis carried out a 3-day pilot project to create a fully functioning Amacis Visibility system to support one of their existing client's electronic messages. The pilot used real data from the client and was highly successful. It demonstrated: • the efficiency of the Amacis Visibility categorisation engine, • the ease of configuration and maintenance, and • the speed of installation of the system. Amacis was so confident that Amacis Visibility could outperform any other product in the marketplace, that it offered an unprecedented guarantee. After initial implementation, Amacis promised to demonstrate an overall categorisation performance figure of 80% accuracy or greater. The accuracy of the system is measured by the number of messages that the system accurately categorises according to the rules that have been applied. If this were not achieved, Amacis would remove the solution from Vertex's systems at no cost. The management team at Vertex were convinced that Amacis Visibility was the product that would allow them to provide the high quality of customer service via the e-channel that they were already renowned for in their other services. The Implementation Amacis Visibility outperformed Vertex's expectations. After the initial pilot and development of a joint business case, Vertex commissioned Amacis to start work as soon as possible. Amacis Professional Services began implementing Amacis Visibility immediately. One Amacis Consultant completed installation and deployment of Amacis Visibility within 4 weeks and went live with 2 major Vertex customers, including all of their response templates, automatic categorisation and routing, and integration to their existing back office systems. In the 6 weeks following deployment, Amacis Visibility: • Provided automation (correct suggested responses) for 80% of inbound messages, • Enabled an increase in productivity of 174%, • Was managed solely by Vertex, as skills transfer had been completed. Vertex is currently implementing Amacis Visibility with other clients. Amacis Amacis, the e-mail and e-service management company is a leading provider of customer relationship management software that transforms the way global enterprises manage customer interaction. Amacis designs software solutions that allow client companies to maximise customer retention and profitability. Amacis products allow all forms of customer interaction - including e-mail, self-service, SMS and webforms - to be managed in a unified environment, Amacis Visibility. Amacis Visibility is particularly suited to large distributed organisations that need a highly scalable, mission critical contact management application to integrate with existing enterprise class systems in a multi-lingual environment. With headquarters in Boston, MA, Amacis also has offices in London (UK), Hong Kong and its main R&D facility in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For more information, visit the Amacis Web Site www.amacis.com or contact info@amacis.com Vertex With an order book of over £1.4 billion, Vertex - a United Utilities plc group company - is one of the UK's leading Business Process Outsourcers specialising in customer management. Its services principally involve the management and operation of customer contact centres on behalf of clients across the utilities, private enterprise and public sectors and providing related information technology infrastructure. In February, the company announced a strategic partnership agreement with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young UK, one of the largest IT and management consultancies in the world. For more information visit www.vertex.co.uk Vertex Data: Server platform: Windows 2000 Database platform: Oracle 8i Implementation time: 3 weeks Client platform: Citrix, Windows NT Message Protocol: POP3 Number of installed clients: 200 "The value of our offering is greatly increased by using Amacis Visibility. It will allow us to move our customers up to the top level of our target operating model whereby we spec, build, deliver, operate and support the whole customer-facing system for an organisation." Dave Clarke, Technology Enablement General Manager, Vertex Ltd. Amacis Limited (hereinafter Amacis) endeavours to ensure that the information in this document is correct but accepts no liability for any error or omission in the same. The development of Amacis products and services is continuous and published information, while current at date of publication, may not reflect the latest situation. Contact Amacis for the latest information. Stated specifications and performance data are for general guidance only.They may require adjustment in particular circumstances and should not, therefore, be taken as formal offers or commitments. Statements in this document are not part of a contract or program product license save insofar as they are incorporated into a license by express written reference. Issue of this document does not entitle the recipient to access or use the products described and such access or use may be subject to separate contracts or licenses. "Amacis", the Amacis graphic device, "Making the Customer Visible", and "Amacis Visibility" are trademarks of Amacis Ltd. Other products mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. (c) Copyright 2002, Amacis Limited. All rights reserved. "We're already benefiting from productivity gains in our first centre and look forward to a rapid and successful roll out to other centres and clients. We're confident the product will prove to be a good investment and one that will enable us to exploit a variety of new opportunities in the future." Dave Clarke, Technology Enablement General Manager, Vertex Ltd. The Benefits How Amacis Visibility Adds Value • Reduces costs of handling webforms and e-mails and/or drives down telephony costs by encouraging customers to use electronic channels. • Allows your organisation to rapidly bring new departments and customers on board, driving earlier revenues and faster returns so your company can see immediate benefits. • Offers concurrent support for multiple clients and contact centres on one instance of the product. • Improves customer satisfaction. • Protects your existing Customer Interaction Management investment by integrating and inter-operating with your existing systems and resources. • Addresses the needs of your customers in their own language. For further information or a live demonstration of how Amacis Visibility can help your organisation, please contact info@amacis.com By using Amacis Visibility, Vertex has: • Reduced the time (to 3 weeks) and set-up cost to fully service new customers. This includes high levels of automation, >75% correct auto-suggestion (previously levels were below 30% and took months of effort to reach even this level). • Increased agent productivity such that each client requires less than 50% of the previous staffing level (using the previous e-mail management product) to supply the same service. • Achieved full pay-back of the original investment in the first 4 months of use and expect a return of 500% in the first year of operation. • The ability to add more customers without further investment in additional hardware. • A competitive edge in the BPO market by being able to provide a superior, broader and faster service to attract new customers. There have been other less-tangible benefits for Vertex in the implementation of Amacis Visibility. Vertex contact centre agents are now multi-skilled and benefiting from job enrichment through dealing with more complex queries and through blending work time between phone calls and e-mails. Dave Clarke also says that the Amacis Customer Support Team have been exceptional. He praised the quality of attention Vertex received and the flexibility and dedication of the Amacis staff. Vertex already has future development plans with Amacis, as Amacis Visibility forms a central part of the company's customer interaction strategy. Amacis North America Amacis Inc 101 Federal Street Suite 1600 Boston MA 02110 T: +1 877 9 AMACIS (Toll Free) F: +1 617 204 5781 E: info@amacis.com W: www.amacis.com Amacis Europe Station Mill Station Road Alresford Hampshire UK SO24 9JQ T: +44 (0)19 6273 8496 F: +44 (0)19 6273 8798 E: info@amacis.com W: www.amacis.com Amacis Europe 8 The Square Stockley Park Uxbridge Middlesex UK UB11 1FW T: +44 (0)20 8610 6048 F: +44 (0)20 8610 6098 E: info@amacis.com W: www.amacis.com Amacis Asia Pacific Amacis Ltd 2802 Admiralty Centre Tower 1 18 Harcourt Road Hong Kong T: +852 2922 2613/1496 F: +852 2861 3420 E: info@amacis.com W: www.amacis.com Amacis R&D Amacis Ltd Falcon Road Belfast BT12 6SJ Northern Ireland T: +44 (0)28 9087 2000 F: +44 (0)28 9087 2001 E: info@amacis.com W: www.amacis.com