Delivering on Promises
Like most CIOs, Warren sees his biggest and most persistent challenge as the need to deliver more with less, and in the shortest time frame possible. He doubts anyone in the industry is a stranger to such pressures. For Warren the keys to meeting that challenge include a heavy emphasis on reusability and a determination not to build where the organisation can buy.
"We've also built a new IT organisation and a new structure . . . We've been bedding that in for the past six months. Now we're starting to get the wins from that," he says.
Building credibility with business leaders was relatively easy, he says, because of the length of time he had been around the business and the number of projects he had been involved with in the past.
"I only moved here in January this year, but when I started commuting probably one of the first things I did was to get all of IT together on a videoconference, and get all of them to understand the new business model that we'd created with my direct reports. We then went out and engaged the organisation with the new structure, presented that new structure to most of the significant leaders in the organisation."
Warren says the approach mirrors his determination to engage with business earlier and more strategically, rather than only at the project and delivery phase. He is determined to get the business involved earlier and more fully in the decision-making processes, and to ensure the IT team offers the benefit of its experience as early as possible rather than just at execution time. It is an approach that is already paying dividends, he says.
"My role is clearly to lead an IT organisation. But the main role I guess I perform," Warren says,"is the one of informing management both upwards and downwards within the organisation of the role that IT plays in the organisation and the value it brings to the organisation."
SIDEBAR: The Online Shout
Lion Nathan is using a CTI implementation to collapse five regional call centres into one
Lion Nathan's computer telephony integration (CTI) project began in 1998, when the company engaged a consultant to help it enhance customer service. CIO Darryl Warren says the company was looking to address several key challenges. One was the regional nature of Lion Nathan's business."We have very strong regional brands such as Castlemaine in Queensland, Swan and Emu brands in Perth and the West End brands in SA," Warren says."The customers relate very strongly to their regional brands and we are a regional brewer."
Another challenge was the peaks and troughs of Lion Nathan's business cycle, with the company facing regular peaks in its order taking and replenishment cycles."The big order taking days of the week are Monday and Tuesday, so order volumes are very heavily skewed to the beginning of the week, following the big draw-offs on the Fridays and the weekends," Warren says."Monday is probably twice as big as Friday, and then there are very large volumes around events like Easter and Anzac Day, so it is a business with very large variations in terms of the number of orders we receive per day."
The need was for a reliable, technically advanced call centre with a host-based routing system to be integrated with a Siebel CRM solution. The system had to allow Lion Nathan to provide customers with a single national call-in number, while allowing Lion Nathan to keep its regional identify.
Lion Nathan selected NSC to provide integration services. The company was the first enterprise in Australia to integrate solutions successfully from Avaya (the desktop application) and Siebel (the front end).
"I guess in terms of competitiveness it really is about improvement of customer satisfaction. When you're in a market that is largely dominated by two major players and a number of smaller players, customer satisfaction is one of the levers you can use to gain market."
The project is now offering a vastly better level of service in the call centre, he says. When customers call, their identity pops up on screen. Agents can answer the phone appropriately according to the region the call is coming from, greet the caller with region-specific announcements, use region-specific music on hold and readily determine the caller's local time.
Agents can display the customer record at same time as the call is presented, and easily link CTI with the customer.
"We weren't doing simple presentation of caller ID to the agent," says Warren."We wanted to screen pop to show who they were, we wanted to be positioned ready to take the order for the particular customer and we wanted to answer the phone appropriately for their region. The ability to be able to answer the phone, for instance, and recognise the customer, is really quite powerful.
"We also get better agent efficiency in terms of the call centre agents. We reduced the time of the call, leading to greater order turnaround. We improved customer satisfaction because they liked being recognised. We had the ability to - through one call centre - act as a regional business.
The call centre and CTI system installation consists of the following functional elements:
- Definity ECS
- CVCT
- Siebel
- CMS
- Conversant with Callback Manager
- Definity Audix
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