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Established in 1948, Cuthbert Stewart Ltd, has grown into a distributor of industrial and electrical products with a multi-million dollar turnover, based on the simple philosophy: “To supply customers with the best product solutions from the global marketplace.”
Today, Cuthbert Stewart’s objective is to meet and exceed customer expectations in an ever-changing market environment. To meet that objective, they have extensive stockholdings with a central distribution warehouse in Wellington, and strategic stock located in Christchurch and Auckland, to ensure on-time deliveries to both the North and South islands of New Zealand. Cuthbert Stewart’s ‘value adding’ services include the manufacturing of junction boxes to suit individual customer terminal and glanding requirements, customization to match supply enclosures, and an extensive range of wire, cable and equipment labeling solutions from a wide variety of brands, including ‘Do-It-Yourself’ computerized systems and ‘Custom Pre-Point’ solutions. The computerized systems are designed to be very fast and easy to use on large or small projects, reducing the labor involved if using manual marking systems.
For Cuthbert Stewart, their dedicated customer service team plays an integral part in providing a high level of service to customers, so when their call center office was in danger of drowning under a tidal wave of paper, they knew they had to act fast.
Business Issue - Storage and Retrieval
The 10 desk call center processes some 5,000 invoices a month, plus assorted ‘packing’ slips, customer orders and other client documentation. “With up to ten documents per client, we were running into huge storage and retrieval problems”, said Claire Davies, Cuthbert Stewart’s Call Center Manager.
Solution
The Call Center turned to their hardware supplier for assistance. The supplier recommended Trapeze Vault from Onstream Systems Ltd as a complete, affordable solution.
The Trapeze Vault system is designed to create automatically your own company’s database with index fields in it, and default retrieval criteria so that results can be easily viewed.
According to Ms. Davies, Trapeze provided an excellent, easy-to-use, easy-to-adapt solution for the call center’s problems, despite some initial teething problems involving the availability of Cuthbert Stewart’s staff. She was particularly impressed with the excellent backup and support for the product through the implementation and training phase and subsequent upgrades.
Cuthbert Stewart’s Call Center is now able to scan in the approximately 50,000 documents received each month, making them instantly retrievable by all ten desks. Query volumes fluctuate, with approximately twenty a week on the credit side of the operations, and generally a higher volume on the order side. If the paperwork was correctly filed, it used to take approximately 10 minutes to locate and respond. Frequently, it could take hours to locate the required documentation so that responses involved call-backs a half-day later. Now queries can be answered immediately with a couple of clicks of the mouse.
An additional benefit with the Trapeze Vault system is the Courier Track and Trace, which is on-screen and eliminates searching through a separate courier book. Archived records are also now available on the system.
In fact, the Call Center now relies solely on the Trapeze Vault software and nightly server back-ups for access, retrieval and modification of the records, and paper records that were previously held for eight years, are now destroyed after six months. This is yielding significant savings on storage costs as the temporary storage is done off-site, and by the pallet.
A more surprising effect of installing Trapeze Vault is that the Call Center is able to scan and retrieve extra client records – records that had been previously discarded.
“It’s certainly user friendly,” comments Ms. Davies, “and because of the efficiency and time-saving aspects it has allowed us to retain fuller records on each client than we were capable of in the past.”
Trapeze Vault has provided Cuthbert Stewart with a paradoxical solution – getting rid of the paper has allowed more paper (in the form of images) to be retained – allowing them to provide a fuller and more complete customer service.
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