Deploys new software to improve customer service, support government compliance mandates
Burlington, MA — November 13, 2003 — Telstra, Australia's main telecommunications company, has gone live with its deployment of ClickSoftware's service optimization solution, which includes service scheduling, workforce planning and business analytics.
ClickSoftware, working in partnership with Accenture, said the project gives Telstra a single application to allocate resources for 27,000 calls a day onto the same schedule. Telstra said it expects that 99 percent of customer calls requesting break/fix support or installation assistance will be handled in the same day.
"This is a revolution for Telstra, being able to optimally schedule every one of our 7,500 technicians in a one-step application," said David Brennan, project director (of FutureEDGE). "We wanted a single application to give us complete visibility across every resource for better decision-making. We can now maximize productivity for better customer service and meet the government compliance mandates set forth for service, while benefiting from a lower cost of ownership with central administration."
Following a two-month project in Tasmania and Queensland in which the provider said the program received full end-user acceptance, ClickSoftware's solutions, including ClickPlan, which provides a Web-based, graphical display of workload and capacity, were rolled out in another two months.
Moshe BenBassat, CEO of ClickSoftware, said, "The rollout shows how Telstra excels in delivering service to its customers nationwide. For organizations this size, the ability to forecast and plan ahead and resolve issues at a strategic level creates the perfect schedule for optimal service delivery on the day."
"There were some unique requirements in the geographic size of Australia, such as handling remote locations and multiple time zones, which only ClickSoftware could handle," added Telestra's Brennan. "With the number of users involved, we also had to get it right first time. Telstra has invested a lot in its (FutureEDGE) project, dealing with every issue of customer service, and we are pleased to have been able to deliver a successful rollout for service chain optimization."
Telstra said it held seminars across Australia to demonstrate the new technology to workforce management teams to assist in the change over for so many users. Accenture was also brought in to implement the solution, which is integrated with Tibco's business integration solutions. ClickSoftware's suite of service optimization products replaced Telstra's Director, which handles workforce scheduling and dispatch.
