Call Center

MITEM call center solutions have been used as a viable and cost-effective alternative to packaged customer relationship management (CRM) applications by such organizations as CalPERS (California Public Employees' Retirement System), L. L. Bean, Baltimore Gas & Electric, EDF Energy, Consolidated Edison, American Electric Power, Swiss Life, and Colonial Savings.

MITEM solutions are built on its MitemView patented integration platform technology. In a call center environment, MITEM solutions and applications pull customer data from legacy systems and other disparate back-end systems and presents it to the client in a Windows, HTML, or Macromedia Flash environment. The MITEM approach eliminates the need for customer service representatives (CSRs) to laboriously sequentially access dozens of screens of information, one by one, to answer a customer inquiry.   With MITEM, a few mouse clicks give CSRs can access to all the customer information they need.

Case-in-Point: CalPERS (California Public Employees' Retirement System)

Summary: CalPERS, the largest public U.S. pension fund, with $170 billion in assets and more than three million active and retired members, needed to prepare for the approaching "wave" of baby boomer retirees and support its expanded services offering. In 1998, it launched a series of technology initiatives to enhance quality of service without hiring additional staff.  

The initial project went live in 1999.  "SmartDesk" is a composite application that integrates multiple separate applications into a single system, thereby greatly simplifying   the work process. CSRs access multiple systems through one application rather than having to toggle through many screens. MITEM provides the legacy integration capability that allows SmartDesk to connect directly to the mainframe data frequently required by CSRs.

Integration Challenge

The continuous expansion of CalPERS' services and membership increased the demand for efficient customer service. Service representatives were often forced to manually hop around as many as ten different applications in response to one telephone inquiry. Moreover, CalPERS' had added many new applications to its mainframe core benefits system to support new processes and record-keeping, resulting in duplicate data entry-and a steeper l learning curve for agents needing to master all these systems.

SmartDesk was designed to give users an intuitive application for integrating and consolidating multiple applications. Critical to its usefulness, however, was being to integrate it with CalPERS' mainframe-based core benefits system. This posed a difficult challenge, which MitemView solved seamlessly.

Since each SmartDesk client had a MitemView client that enabled mainframe access,   when CalPERS decided to extend its integration infrastructure, it also needed to extend this vital legacy integration component.

Solution

CalPERS expanded the SmartDesk client integration by incorporating the new features of Oracle's 9iAS integration infrastructure and elevating MitemView from the client level to the server level.  

With its new system, CalPERS achieved two key objectives: users gained one integrated view of all the organization's disparate systems and applications, and all users of the new enhanced Oracle 9iAS system gained direct mainframe access to legacy data.

MITEM's rapidly deployed, non-invasive solution reduced average application development time by 25 percent, according to CalPERS estimates.

With 400 CalPERS users currently fully deployed on the new system, CalPERS plans ultimately to expanded the system to its entire user 1,200-member community.

Benefits

The SmartDesk application reduced CalPERS' total cost of ownership for systems, improved customer service capabilities, increased overall effectiveness of operational processes by 20%, and created a more robust customer relationship management environment.

SmartDesk reduced average call duration time from 6.5minutes to 4 minutes reduced system navigation time for end-users by 30%, and reduced training time for customer service representative by 30%.