Amdocs' tools to help telcos lift their customer service game

Stuart Corner
Friday, 28 October 2011 15:27

Business IT - Technology

Amdocs has launched a new suite of products to enable telco customer service reps to better respond to customer queries, in particular to the deluge of enquiries generated to a large extent by the proliferation of smartphones. It would fit very well with Telstra CEO David Thodey's mantra of focussing on the customer.

According to Amdocs: "Amdocs Customer Management 8.1 provides a simplified and intuitive user interface (UI) for CSRs in contact centres and retail stores (including tablet support); better tools for handling the growing volume of smartphone-related support calls; and process automation for faster order taking."

The company claims to already have several wins from service providers across North America, Europe and Asia. Yossi Zohar, head of product marketing, for Amdocs Customer Management division, told ExchangeDaily: "We are working with a major customer in Australia on selling this. They have other components of Amdocs, but not Customer Management. So for us it would be a new deployment."

Telstra is already a major Amdocs customer. In 2006 as part of then CEO Sol Trujillo's much vaunted 'transformation' of Telstra Amdocs was awarded a multi-year, multimillion dollar OSS contract. More recently, in July 2010, Telstra subsidiary Sensis signed a new six-year contract with Amdocs for the support and development of its customer relationship management, production and provisioning platform and other associated IT managed services. And in November 2009 Amdocs revealed that Telstra had deployed the Amdocs ChangingWorlds personalisation technology to support its BigPond Mobile portal.

Zohar told ExchangeDaily that CM 8.1 was designed to address the growing burden of customer support. "Customers gravitate to assisted channels whether it is a store or a call centre, because they want to ask questions, make sure they are making the right decision. On the support side it is because they are frustrated, seeing something they do not expect. They don't care about looking for answers on the web.

"It is getting worse because there are more and more smartphones and they are injecting more complexity. So there is an impact on customer satisfaction and or the business. All this calls for a new look at how we make the lives of these sales and support people easier - putting the burden on the system instead of on the people. This is why we are coming out with customer management 8.1. The focus is on improving the efficiency of the agent."

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