Call Center and IVR Success: Number Nine Visual Technology

The Company
Number Nine Visual Technology provides PC-based graphics display solutions.A publicly held company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, Number Ninehas more than 130 employees, and offices in California, Germany, and Japan.

The Problem
For several years, Number Nine relied on a Centrex-based telecommunicationssystem to support more than 40 full-time agents working in the sales andcustomer-support departments. To handle the numerous incoming sales andcustomer-service calls received daily, the company used an Automatic CallDistributor (ACD) to distribute calls uniformly among the agents. The ACD's lackof flexibility, however, caused in-house MIS engineers to be less thansatisfied. The ACD was difficult to control, and when the company shut it downat the end of the day, the engineers often weren't sure whether callers in thequeue were being disconnected.

The Solution
Looking for a truly flexible solution, Number Nine began to evaluatealternative call-center solutions. It chose the network-based Distributed CallCenter from Teloquent Communications.

With Distributed Call Center, the sales manager and technical supportsupervisor have monitors that give them realtime reports about how many peopleare in the queue. This capability lets them make decisions about how many peopleneed to staff the phones during certain time periods. The Distributed CallCenter also lets the company identify and analyze improvement areas. Forexample, reports indicated that 2.5 percent of calls were lost. The companyanalyzed why these calls were lost so that it could make improvements.

Another important feature for Number Nine is the product's skills-basedrouting feature, which IVR makes possible. The company's products operate on avariety of computing platforms, so this feature offers a distinct advantagebecause it can route a technical support call to the agent most familiar with aspecific OS or platform.

This feature also helped Number Nine with an unexpected problem. To counterextreme weather conditions one winter, the company routed calls to agents whowere snowed in at home. The company was able to provide customers with technicalsupport during a time when the majority of companies in the region were closed.

In the near future, Number Nine plans to move its technical supportdepartment to Burlington, Massachusetts, while keeping the sales department inLexington. As the result of Distributed Call Center's flexibility, the companywill be able to seamlessly network both locations.