Responding to customers in 12 seconds?

“The first challenge we faced was making sure this channel would serve our customers properly,” explains the PG Group's marketing director Sean Harrison. “Most company websites do little more than provide information, but we wanted ours to immediately connect prospective customers with the specific people who could best meet their needs.”

“We researched the tools available and opted to install The Virtual Works' V3 application,” explains Harrison. “It uses a sophisticated blend of Enterprise 2.0 technologies to intelligently match the customer and their exact need to the most appropriate solution provider and instantaneously route their request by both cellphone (SMS) and email within 12 seconds.”

“Customers are frequently surprised at just how quick the response is,” says Harrison. “Often it is so swift, they are still on the website.”

Intuitive intelligence

Once a PG Glass franchisee ‘claims' the customer request, V3's workflow engine starts tracking the lead and if the necessary activities or ‘steps' don't happen in time, a series of alerts and escalations are triggered to help manage the process.

This ability to ensure that resources fulfill the service by identifying interruptions to workflow or failures to respond by time deadlines is important because it is also responsible for the system's reliability.

“When we set V3 up with PG Glass, we identified every potential customer need and the corresponding workflow scenarios,” explains Jonathan Hall, CEO of The Virtual Works. “Each of the individual workflow steps required was determined and mapped into unique sequences and timeframes.”

Hall is also quick to point out that this process is not the slow and expensive procedure typically associated with customising sophisticated software. “From the outset, the idea behind V3 was that, rather than forcing the company to fit the system's model, the system should adapt to and fit the company,” he clarifies.

It's this ability to be comprehensively customised that Hall believes makes V3 so attractive to forward-thinking organisations. “It's a really powerful advantage,” he maintains. “It allows a company to configure and cluster its resources in any way, shape or form that works or makes sense for them.”

Hall explains that V3's ability to be completely customised without being re-engineered is a result of its unusual architecture. “We have created what we call a ‘hive' structure within the system,” he enthuses, “which uses custom configurable rules to determine how leads, information and alerts and escalations flow. It's a smart way of gluing people to communication paths, hierarchies and distribution rules.”

Another advantage Enterprise 2.0-based tools such as V3 offer is pervasive mobility. “Mobility is now essential to most businesses,” observes Hall. “Systems need to ‘be' wherever the people who need to use them are and that's increasingly not chained to their office desktop. That's why V3 has SMS technology incorporated into it as well.”

Real-time reporting

An additional feature of the locally developed system that attracted Harrison and the PG Group is the real-time reporting V3 makes possible. “Meaningful metrics allow us to objectively assess and improve our performance,” confirms Harrison, “and because V3 is a hosted application, it is constantly updating and feeding us this vital data in real-time. We don't have to wait until the end of the month.”

V3 includes a comprehensive bank of standard reports, but customised reports can also be created. “One of our key reports, for instance, measures the time taken between receipt of a query or lead and its completion,” observes Harrison, “which has allowed us to establish precise performance benchmarks.”

While it is still early days and the PG Glass system has only been in operation for eight months, the results have reportedly already been dramatic. “Despite not advertising the site at all, Internet leads have grown by 110% during the first six months,” confirms Harrison. “These are worth in excess of R1 million per month, so we anticipate the channel will deliver around R12 million in its first year.”

Additional savings have been created through the reduced transactional costs as well. “The cost of doing business through this medium is much lower than other conventional means, like call centres,” Harrison notes, “which boosts its overall impact on an organisation's bottom line.”

Another saving the system has created for PG Glass is from printing, and distributing information and documentation to all of its franchisees. “It also operates like an extranet,” explains Harrison, “handling a lot of the communication between head office and the 130 branches. Estimates suggest it may save us around R1 million in printing costs alone each year.”

Considerable cultural impact

Nonetheless, Harrison acknowledges that the implementation did present some challenges. “It's perhaps often underestimated by companies, but the cultural impact of introducing a system like this can also be considerable,” he observes. “It throws the entire company into stark relief and so it's important to make sure your staff understand and can meet the new expectations as well.”

If the early results are anything to go by, though, the adjustments have already paid off tremendously. “In the end, you have to be agile to successfully compete and thrive in the modern economy,” concludes Harrison, “and agility, in our case, is being able to leap over and serve customers first, which you can only do if the information in your organisation - its lifeblood in the modern economy - is flowing rapidly and precisely.”