WRQ Verastream Customers Including Afni Inc., AT&T Global Customer Care and State of Delaware Division of Revenue Improve Service Delivery and Slash Costs
SEATTLE, April 4, 2005 — WRQ, Inc. today announced that an increasing number of contact center-intensive companies are turning to WRQ Verastream host integration software to cut call center costs while maintaining the high-end services that customers demand. By creating a fast, easy-to-use, web-based front-end on top of existing legacy systems, Verastream works easily with other contact center technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, enabling customers to slash caller wait times, eliminate data-entry errors, boost agent call times and save training time and dollars.
Contact center-centric companies such as Afni, AT&T Global Customer Care, Balboa Life Insurance, British Telecom Retail, Clark County Public Utilities Department, Countrywide Financial, Denver Newspaper Agency, Iceland Telecom, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Schenker BTL AB, State of Delaware Division of Revenue (DOR) and Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, among others, are standardizing on WRQ Verastream as their host integration platform.
“With Verastream, contact centers no longer need to be cost centers,” said Randy Robinson, vice president of products at WRQ. “Redundant process, operational costs, regulatory compliance, disparate systems and consolidation issues make it difficult for contact centers to integrate the customer information locked away in their legacy assets.”
Leveraging WRQ® software, contact centers have increased productivity and efficiencies by rapidly optimizing existing functionality stored within multiple legacy applications. Irv Schechtman, director of MIS for the State of Delaware DOR, wanted to provide a simple web interface for their call system's 41 screens. “We needed to simplify the system for internal users to make them more productive,” he said. “And in order to deal more effectively with outside agencies, we needed to restructure our business processes.”
Now, each new web application can be developed faster than the one before it because the necessary building blocks have already been generated. In fact, the DOR has already begun reusing the services to streamline the four other functions in their billing and collections application. “Verastream has been easy for our developers to work with and learn the host modeling,” concluded Schechtman. “It's a robust product that has been significant in its impact on us.”
According to Merchants Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report 2005, a prominent global industry report, integration is key to improving agent productivity for contact centers all over the world: “The lack of system integration in many contact centers also means that agents are spending longer on wrapping up calls (an average of six minutes per call) than on talking to customers (an average of four minutes per call).”
For example, Afni, an outsourcer of call center-based services, turned to WRQ Verastream to help solve this type of problem for a wireless customer. In this case, the client's customer service representatives had to access account records that resided on slow and difficult-to-navigate AS/400 applications. The slow system meant callers often had to wait an hour or longer to get through. And, once a caller got through, the wait continued, typically another 12 minutes, as an operator waded through green screen after green screen trying to find, change or add data.
Within one month, Afni developed and deployed the new system by leveraging WRQ Verastream, and set up a team of customer service representatives with the new technology. By reducing the number of screens a rep saw from as many as 60 down to five or six, the new system made viewing account records easier. It also reduced the processing time needed to fulfill accounts receivable information to just seconds per request and slashed customer ordering time. Consequently, the cost of providing customer service was cut by about two-thirds, saving thousands of dollars.
Matt Ernst, Afni’s director of application development, said Verastream’s speed and automation helped move the project along quickly. “The customer’s test system was not in sync with the production system. And, as we got out of the test system, we realized that, so we had to make modifications in a very short period of time,” he said. “The ability to just remap or make alterations as we mapped the screens, and for it to take effect across the board was huge for us.”
About WRQ Verastream
WRQ Verastream is proven host integration software that enables IT management, application developers, project managers and service providers to rapidly optimize existing legacy functionality to increase productivity and generate early ROI. WRQ Verastream is positioned in the Leaders quadrant on Gartner Inc.’s Programmatic Integration Server Magic Quadrant, 2005.