Cims
Parity helps Cims move to new modern customer call centre
Background
Solid IT support is crucial to the operations of any marketing company which delivers computer-driven loyalty programmes to high- profile consumer organisations.
Cims is a leading membership marketing company which delivers lifestyle-orientated services on a monthly or annual basis to customers of banks and other organisations.
From the beginning of 2002 Parity Solutions was asked to provide application management and development expertise to support the company’s legacy systems.
More than 17 million consumers across Europe currently use Cims-designed products such as travel insurance, credit card protection and shopping discounts. These products and services are managed by Cims for its clients to help them strengthen their customer relationships.
The challenge
Working with membership databases, Cims was managing customers through its six 24-hour call centres. Each call centre used a number of membership databases running on mainframe and client-server platforms.
As part of its support services, Parity was asked to help Cims implement and Roll Out a new Siebel call centre. The chief aim was to replace the existing six disparate legacy systems with a single, flexible, easily-maintainable system which could support common business processes.
"The existing call centres had different technologies and the legacy systems were all slightly different. Cims was not getting any benefits of scale. The aim was to re-engineer the business processes to be the same and re-engineer the technology to support those new processes,"
explains David Walters, project manager for Parity Solutions.
"Our transition role was to ensure that the company’s IT support function was ready to take on and support the Siebel application when it was rolled out."
The Solution
Parity worked closely with IT Managers at Cims to plan and coordinate the implementation of the new Siebel system effectively.
"We identified which staff needed training. We wrote a lot of standards and processes; drew up service level agreements and put in place change management controls. We prepared their people to be able to continue to do business as usual, using the new technology,"
Walters says.
A series of streams of work were identified by Parity and these included documenting the IT support processes which were required to support the implementation of Siebel; a change management stream of work which implemented policies and processes to manage application releases in the new environment; and a system security stream.
The IT acceptance testing stream identified the criteria for IT acceptance and produced detailed test plans. And the support set-up stream ensured that IT support was ready to take on support of the new system and ensure its smooth running for Cims.
Parity believes that an effectively managed transition to a new IT system is crucial for the success of 3rd party package implementations. However the streams of work can differ from organisation to organisation depending on its IT capability and maturity. Ideally transition planning should be started early in a project and buy-in at senior levels of a company is regarded as critical to a successful transition project.
Benefits
Paul Lawrence, head of commercial operations for Parity Business Solutions, says that Cims now has an improved and more flexible support structure and skilled IT support teams in place; as well as a set of IT standards, policies, processes and procedures to ensure the Siebel application is supported effectively.
"In our work for Cims we have demonstrated our ability to work comfortably and effectively with mixed teams. Parity is flexible in its approach and with Cims we have demonstrated how we can draw upon our deep experience and quickly provide new skill sets and ramp up our IT teams to meet fast-changing requirements."
Lawrence highlights the fact that Parity was able to quickly adjust to meet the changing requirements of the project’s brief and was able to rapidly provide a team with the relevant skills.
A spokesperson for Cims says:
"We pride ourselves on our first class customer service. Parity provides us with reliable and flexible support for our technology systems. They are an integral part of our team and can scale up rapidly with new teams and skills as they are required."
Parity Business Solutions is focused on maximising investment returns through the design, building and management of complete systems covering a variety of business functions. Parity’s consultants specialise in customer relationship management, security and applications management, interactive commerce, web-enablement and providing services across a wide range of vertical sectors.
