Agent Workflow System (AWS) was an initiative to revamp Iron Mountain’s customer care program. AWS was a replacement for the existing hosted customer case management platform implemented using Salesforce.com (SFDC). The main objectives of this program were to:
- Significantly improve the customer and agent experience,
- Automatically route phone/mails to agents to create and resolve customer requests
Iron Mountain is an S&P500 Enterprise Information Management Services company, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Its records management, information destruction and data backup and recovery services are supplied to more than 156,000 customers throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Iron Mountain’s drive to enable higher customer satisfaction through its Customer Care Program (CCP) included many initiatives in areas of Quality, Process, People and Technology. A major IT vendor was engaged to replace the existing hosted customer case management platform (implemented in SalesForce.com), by an in-house platform on IBM BPM. IT vendor’s design and execution did not meet Iron Mountain’s desired end result.
Apex teamed up with Virtusa to design and implement a new version of the Agent Workflow System (AWS) application from the ground up. The existing Salesforce system used by Customer Service Agents (CSAs) for case management, included creation, updating and closing of cases. To work on a case, CSAs often had to use various other applications, and had to go to different screens in each application to get the relevant information. This resulted in delays in resolving the issue, and hence increased the turnaround time to the end customer.
Apex led a hybrid team of IRM and Virtusa onshore and offshore resources to redesign the Business Dashboard to meet the performance and scalability requirements for 400 plus end users. The team developed call request processes that enabled IRM's Care Center to track and handle requests from external customers via phone or email.
The process application included automated routing of cases to agents based on factors like vertical, skill, work load, availability and SLA. Apex also provided specialized user interface capabilities through Apex Coach Views (ACV) toolkit. Finally, Apex conducted remote and onsite workshops to mentor offshore resources on best practices for IBM BPM, Agile methodologies, and Apex Coach Views as well as providing guidance on development patterns.
