Bandeirante de Energia supplies electrical power to a customer base of about 2.2 million people in the growing area of São Paulo and in additional cities throughout Brazil. As soon as the company was spun-off from Eletropaulo (Eletricidade de São Paulo S.A), Bandeirante faced immediate customer service challenges – there was virtually no customer support structure in place.
In order to build a customer support system and to manage customer interactions throughout its service areas, Bandeirante decided to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) program, integrating legacy mainframe data with a CRM solution. Bandeirante turned to the Gaia CRM system by Idea Consult, in conjunction with Attachmate Consulting Services, to carry out the CRM integration. Using these powerful integration solutions, Bandeirante has built a customer support system which provides support staff with all the pertinent mainframe information they need – in a totally graphical desktop interface.
Speedy implementation was an absolute necessity
Because Bandeirante had not inherited any customer support structure from its predecessor, the IT staff had to develop – in a record period of 15 days – a complete customer support system capable of responding to 223,000 monthly calls, most of them related to information held in the mainframe.
“The option of using the old 3270 access terminals to search for data in the mainframe was so time-consuming and difficult that we didn’t even take that into consideration,” explained José Bento Bueno, manager of the Commercial Systems Division of Bandeirante. In his opinion, another available alternative was to rewrite the data residing in the mainframe into a lower platform. “But the difficulty caused by a staff reduction right at the inception of our existence as a company could have been fatal to our organization,” he continued.
Customer support solution needed agility
With all the resources provided by the Gaia CRM platform, the development team designed the Ligue-Luz application, a group of pages and search systems totally oriented toward user ease and convenience. By merely entering a subscriber’s name or address, for example, Ligue-Luz automatically finds and compiles relevant information from several databases, and delivers it to graphical user screens that can be accessed directly by the customer support staff.
“The same kind of procedure was adopted for other services such as our emergency support – gathering in a single interface all the data relative to the occurrence and the procedures to be adopted by the Operational and Dispatch Centers,” commented Bueno. “This creates a much more efficient workflow.”
Reducing training time and optimizing call responses
With the implementation of graphical interfaces and automatic routines, Bandeirante has managed to reduce the training cycle and has optimized the average response time of calls by 50%. Attachmate EXTRA! provides centralized management for the customer support routines and exploits the performance mediation resources contained in the Gaia CRM, such as the generation of statistics for cost evaluation and service quality.
Taking advantage of legacy infrastructures for new initiatives
Roberto Rebouças, Attachmate’s technical director for Latin America, believes the solution implemented in Bandeirante reinforces the trend of big corporations integrating their legacy structures into the new distributed architecture deployments, with the CRM and enterprise resource management (ERM) platforms.
“With tools such as EXTRA! and Attachmate solutions that are now part of the Synapta product family, companies can take advantage of valuable mainframe data, and easily leverage it for use in state-of-the-art applications for the new Internet economy,” Rebouças said. These solutions allow organizations to develop CRM and Internet portal solutions using their existing corporate data – without the need for time-consuming and costly downsizing or ERP implementations.
Additional customer service initiatives on the horizon
According to Bueno, two outstanding aspects of the new solution have been its practical features and the implementation speed. Bandeirante is now transferring much of the same technology from the call centers to the direct customer support centers spread throughout cities serviced by the company.
The company is using a phased approach as it further automates customer service. For example, Bandeirante is implementing resources for Audible Response Unit and Computer-Telephony Integration to extend services beyond the corporate intranet to an extranet service. “As we finish each phase, our customers will be able to do more things: search and print bills electronically from the Web and make payments or request services online – services that previously were only offered in person or via the call centers,” concluded Bueno.