Case Studies - Trade-Van

CosmoCall Universe Enables 24x7x365 Customer Support for Taiwan's Trade-Van Information Services

View PDF version

Trade-Van Information Services Co., based in Taipei, Taiwan and partly owned by the Taiwan Ministry of Finance, provides organizations with a range of information services that use the Internet to increase business performance. These services include cargo clearance, e-commerce, global logistics, finance, insurance, land information, and tax filing solutions. Trade-Van's flagship product is Cargo Clearance System, CCS, a comprehensive cargo clearance and control system that connects all customs clearance businesses into an automated information exchange environment. Used to process all cargo imported to Taiwan, the service includes sea and air cargo clearance, a duty payment system, and a bonded factory documents exchange system. CCS is utilized by a wide range of customers, including customs, shipping lines, banks, and airlines such as Eva Air, a major passenger and freight carrier that flies to more than 40 destinations on four continents.

To service its customers, Trade-Van was employing a staff of customer support agents who were using a telephone-only call center system that provided CRM-driven customer data to speed problem resolution. But it was becoming increasingly clear that Trade-Van's current system would not be able to meet the evolving needs of its growing business and the requirements of its customers. For example, the system provided no real time management information about contact center activities such as the number of calls in queue, the number of agents available, and the longest wait time, all of which are critical to the proper allocation of manpower and, therefore, customer satisfaction. In addition, Eva Air and other key customers were seeking alternative media such as web chat to communicate with the contact center, and Trade-Van's system could only support telephone contacts. By far the greatest challenge facing Trade-Van's support team was the need to ensure non-stop, 24x7 operation to its customers from a region where employees often cannot travel to work during typhoon season. The new system also needed the flexibility to accommodate Trade-Van's future needs. After exploring a number of options, Trade-Van chose CosmoCall Universe™, an all-IP, universal access contact center system from CosmoCom™.

CosmoCall Universe provides Trade-Van with a real time view of all contact center activities, including queues, skills, teams, groups, and more, allowing them to identify trouble spots quickly. An extensive set of GUI tools enables Trade-Van to easily and quickly make rapid changes to these elements without interrupting service. Such changes are propagated instantly to all call center locations. Real-time and historical reports are available via standard reporting tools, and the system also enables Trade-Van to create custom reports.

To further ensure quality customer service, Trade-Van's contact center supervisors use CosmoCall Universe to monitor agents via either silent monitoring mode or the whisper mode, which allows them to coach the agent without the caller hearing anything. This applies for all media types including telephone calls, email, and web chat. CosmoCall Universe also offers phone-based monitoring, which allows an authorized Trade-Van reviewer to listen to a sample of telephone calls being served from any queue or group of queues.

Since CosmoCall Universe supports multi-channel contacts, including web chat, customers can now communicate with Trade-Van via this channel in addition to using the telephone. To initiate a chat session, customers simply click on the "click to talk" button, which is located on the Trade-Van service web page. Since CosmoCall Universe's web chat capability is pure HTML, there is nothing for Trade-Van's customers to download or install. To further expand contact choices to their customers, Trade-Van plans to add email and voicemail support in the near future. Enabling this new functionality is simply done using the GUI management tools mentioned above.

Delivering 24x7x365 customer support can be a challenge for Taipei-based organizations like Trade-Van, because typhoons often close down entire segments of the island during that time of the year. By implementing CosmoCall Universe, Trade-Van can provide non-stop support, because the platform easily enables employees to work from home when they cannot travel. This is because the CosmoCall Universe all-IP platform is "Virtual By Design." It enables the creation of a virtual call center in which agents can be located anywhere but still function as a single unit. Supervisors can monitor and manage all call center activities via any IP-connected PC. The virtual call center provides every agent with all functions and features, and enables seamless call routing and transferring across the organization, regardless of staff location. Further bolstering Trade-Van's ability to ensure non-stop service is the inherent resiliency of IP technology. IP networks, like the Internet, are based on decentralized computing. Each packet of data is labelled with its intended destination, and, if an outage occurs somewhere suddenly, packets are automatically rerouted around the trouble spot.

Trade-Van has activated the "home office" plan for four times due to the frequent typhoon attacks in 2004. The longest period the contingency plan was in effect was 48 hours when the strong, slow-moving typhoon Aere lashed Taiwan on 24th August 2004. Howling winds and torrential rain battered Taipei closing financial markets, offices and schools for 2 days. Realizing the emergency needs, Trade-Van had well-prepared the workforce management plan in advance. Owing to the significant drop of call volume during typhoon period, in order to better allocate the man-power resources, Trade-Van decided to divide all agents into 2 teams. Each team was lead by a supervisor; the teams reported to duty on a rotate basis. With the web-based real-time management and monitoring tools, the supervisor was able to manage the team as if they were all in the office.

As noted earlier, Trade-Van's previous contact center system provided agents with CRM-driven customer data as a means to speed problem resolution and ensure customer satisfaction. The new system needed to do the same or more. CosmoCall Universe provided Trade-Van with the ability to easily implement screen pops of customer information for all contact channels. This was made possible by the platform's high integratabililty. In CosmoCall Universe, all major functions reside on the same platform, and all contact channels were implemented from the ground up on that one unified platform. This unified approach makes much of the integration required in legacy call centers unnecessary, as the IVR, ACD, and agent are automatically synchronized and always have the same complete call-related information available. Integration to external systems such as CRM is also greatly simplified because of this unity. External systems only need to exchange information and synchronize with one point in the system, usually the agent application, while legacy CTI integrations require a separate CTI server to coordinate the actions of ACD, IVR, and Agent with the external application. Application integration is facilitated by CosmoCall Universe's rich set of open, standards-based APIs, which are easy to use and well understood by a large number of programmers.

Realizing that the cornerstone of customer support success is the agent team, Trade-Van was concerned about agent acceptance of the new, IP-based system, as well as how quickly the team would adapt to the new interface. Agents responded very well to the new system. CosmoCall Universe's browser-based agent client enabled agents to ramp up quickly. Agents not only accept the new system, but also strongly prefer it to the old one. According to a Trade-Van manager, whenever agents had to revert to the old system during the transition phase, they were all asking how soon the new system would be available again.

CosmoCall Universe is meeting Trade-Van's immediate needs to deliver non-stop customer service, offer instant support via web chat, and provide real time management and monitoring tools. It will also accommodate Trade-Van's future goals of providing email and voicemail support. In addition, the company plans to add CosmoCall Universe's recording component to its system as a means to further ensure top-notch customer service.