As part of the long-term transformation of its back office that began with an Oracle CRM implementation five years ago, satellite television and broadband provider, DIRECTV, is now focused on bringing its retail channels into the fold by integrating Oracle’s Contact Center on Demand.
Treating its more than 5,000 retail dealers as customers will require DIRECTV to integrate contact center solutions for its 675 sales and support representatives with its existing customer relationship management databases to provide the same customer and business information as the rest of the company gets in serving its 18 million U.S. customers.
The new contact center application provides the sales and support agents that manage relationships with dealers with the tools to deliver faster, more accurate service. The Contact Center on Demand allows DIRECTV to route calls to recently created centers of excellence where agents have specific skills or knowledge in a particular area.
Liam Maxwell, vice president of products at Oracle, said DIRECTV is leading the way when it comes to connecting a geographically-dispersed sales force for optimal results.
The contact center implementation builds on DIRECTV’s existing success with Oracle CRM on Demand, which it uses as the centralized repository for its sales and support representatives.
When DIRECTV implemented the CRM portion of this solution, the area sales managers (ASMs) were awash in paperwork, said Erik Walters, project manager of sales operations at DIRECTV. “They were getting different reports from different people in different parts of the organization. We had to get our ASMs better information. Their job is to make sure our dealers have the right information from a marketing perspective and help them grow their subscriber base,” he said.
He added that they were spending a lot of time in the office preparing for visits to the customer. “We had to get our people out of the office and into the field,” Walters said.
