ROGERS

Rogers Communications Chooses T4G for Customer Contact Analytics

Rogers Communications Inc. (TSX: RCI; NYSE: RG) is a diversified communications and media company. It is Canada's largest cable-TV operator and mobile-phone provider with 2.3 million and 6.5 million customers respectively. Rogers' array of services from video-on-demand and high-speed Internet to wireless email and digital voice generate large volumes of customer calls on a broad range of topics. Channeling those calls to the appropriate destination for the fastest service can be a challenge.

T4G Limited has been building and managing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) analytics solutions for the Rogers IT Management group since 2001 and through several generations of technology. Today's IVR analytics system amalgamates high volumes of customer call data from across Canada and allows Rogers to gain insight into:

  • Call centre operations and customer call volumes and transactions;
  • Effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns;
  • Customer service levels; and
  • Customer interests and behaviour.

Reports range from high-level overviews to detailed drill downs. This provides business and operations user groups with the ability to measure what has been built through a customized level of information.

Situation

Customer service contact centres or call centres are an invaluable tool for most organizations, especially a company like Rogers with its vast array of products and services. Call centres can be the single most influential factor affecting acquisition and retention of customers.

That is because these pivotal points of contact can infuriate customers with things like an automated "Your call is important to us" followed by an interminable length of time on hold waiting for help. Customers measure success by getting a solution to their problem the fastest way possible. Effective IVR systems speed up the process; ineffective IVR systems increase irritation at alarming rates.

In today's competitive marketplace where understanding the customer and anticipating behavior is paramount, corporations need the ability to accurately measure what is being used and how it is being used with one application development cycle.

"Our call centre service is good, but it needed to get better as we continue to add new customers and new products and services at an accelerating pace," says Linda Kennedy, Rogers manager of IVR infrastructure. "We needed to close the loop and get a 360-degree view of our customers, across all lines of business, to give us a better understanding of each and every Rogers customer."

Creating the right customized solution would be no simple task, acknowledged Steve Walintschek, head of the T4G project team. "It was extremely beneficial that we had two distinct advantages: first, Rogers always brings us in right at the beginning of the developing cycle. And second, Microsoft technology is the most flexible and, from a developer's point of view, the .Net framework, tools and applications are best to work with."

Rogers' legacy IVR reporting environment consisted of a Crystal Reports .Net solution. With the arrival of speech enabled IVR applications, Rogers had a need for a reporting solution that would:

  • Handle enterprise levels of call data incoming every day;
  • Be robust enough to handle increasing data volumes and daily changes to underlying data structures;
  • Integrate old Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) application data with new speech enabled application data;
  • Provide users with 24x7 access to reports;
  • Provide metrics over multiple lines of business through one access point; and
  • Measure customer activity through multiple applications within one call.

Solution

T4G recognizes the most cost-efficient design and implementation of an upgraded IVR reporting platform must be based upon Microsoft technology. A data model using SQL Server 2000 was created on Windows 2003 with reports built in Analysis and Reporting Services. Both new and existing reports were made available to users through a web portal.

To handle the high data volumes, the solution was split across five production servers, including two staging servers, two reporting servers and one archive server. For business decision makers at Rogers, data is captured and processed on an hourly basis and aggregated daily into multiple OLAP cubes to increase query speed. SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) is used to apply complex business rules as data transformations.

The reporting solution includes:

  • A meta-data management web tool for administrators to manage reporting reference information through an internet browser;
  • A notification and logging module for efficient communication of system status, streamlining system administration; and
  • Automated recovery checks that enable the system to automatically recover from general system outages

Benefits

The T4G implemented reporting solution gives Rogers a state-of-the-art, single reporting solution that integrates with old legacy systems for increased ROI and removal of previous performance issues

"As more and more people bundle services from our Home Phone and digital television to Blackberries and more, this allows us to really service our customers, understand what they want and better tailor our marketing towards these wants and needs," Rogers' Linda Kennedy says.

The solution does this by consolidating a large quantity of data that non-technical users access to make better business decisions. An added benefit is that the Microsoft technology reduces the manual effort required to maintain the system.

"It will also scale-up effectively offering Rogers so many competitive advantages," T4G's Walintschek says. "This is a paradigm shift from application focused reporting to customer focused reporting. Any way you look at it, Rogers sees its customers and their behavior across various Rogers companies and that means Rogers can make evidence-based marketing decisions based on customers' wants, needs and actual behavior today, instead of last week or last year."

 

Back to Case Studies