Kyocera 7135 smartphone

It's a phone, a PDA, a portable computer and an entertainment center, all in one.

Aspect Communications and Xora

Background
Aspect Communications, a Silicon Valley-based Fortune 1000 company, is the leading provider of multi-channel contact centers - business communications solutions that help companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce operating costs, gather market intelligence, and increase revenue. Aspect employs a large field service organization of 200 engineers involved in the maintenance and installation of their contact center systems. Before implementing a wireless solution, the field force was equipped with separate mobile phones and pagers. An application from Clarify (Clear Support, Clear Logistics), now part of Amdocs, was used for recording field service requests from customers.

Business Challenge
Before implementing a wireless solution, Aspect used a lengthy process to notify Customer Operations Engineers (COEs) of new service requests:

Customers would contact the Customer Support Center (CSC) and log a request for service.
A dispatch agent at CSC would analyze the request and assign a COE.
CSC would page the COE.
The COE would then call the CSC to retrieve details on the service request, including customer name, location, and other information. The CSC support specialist would query the Clarify database and relay the details to the COE over the phone.
After arriving at the customer site, the COE would determine whether spare parts were needed, and would call the CSC again.
Upon finishing the service request, the COE would again call the CSC to close the case.

The average time spent retrieving information on the details of the service request was one to two hours, due to callbacks and contact person availability. Spare part orders and service request closure would add more time to the process.

Devices with limited functionality like pagers and mobile phones gave COEs limited ability to access information and service customers. In some cases, the COEs spent more time retrieving information from the dispatch agent at the CSC than in actual service at the customer site. Additionally, some customers had contracts that stipulated a two-hour response time on a 24/7 basis. There were several instances when this service level could not be met due to the COE's inability to access information remotely.

Solution
Aspect Communications deployed a two-part wireless solution to their communications problem. First, the company equipped the COEs with the Kyocera QCP 6035 smartphone, which combines a mobile phone, Palm OSŽ handheld, pager, and Web access via a HTML or WAP browsers. Second, Aspect selected Xora's EnterpriseOne's mobility, which enables remote workers to access all of the company's enterprise applications, including E-mail/PIM.

The Kyocera QCP 6035 smartphone, along with the Xora EnterpriseOne mobility platform and the Xora Mobility Connector for Clarify, armed Aspect's field force with a single tool to enter, view and retrieve information regarding all service requests. Key benefits resulting from this wireless solution include:

The COE's information retrieval and database interaction times were reduced from six hours to 20 minutes.
The COE was armed with real time availability of spare part and pricing information.
Time and Expense information that was previously entered via dial-up access or fax/e-mail was now enabled via the Kyocera 6035 smartphone's WAP or HTML browser, reducing overall administrative time from 40 minutes to 10 minutes. Additionally, the COE could access this information by calling the CSC on the smartphonehaving a natural 2-way dialogue with Clarify using speech recognition technology from Xora EnterpriseOne.
CSC support specialists, who handled in-bound phone calls and dispatching from the COEs, were re-deployed to other areas that would increase customer satisfaction.
The open architecture of Xora's systems integration platform allowed the customer to easily scale and integrate other enterprise applications such as logistics/sales/inventory and deploy them simultaneously. Aspect's enterprise application ecosystem also includes Oracle Applications (ERP), Siebel and MS Exchange.

Conclusion
The Kyocera QCP 6035 smartphone, as a wireless access terminalalong with the Xora for the XoraEnterpriseOne mobility platform, provides an all-encompassing foundation for enterprise-wide data mobility projects. The COEs became more productive and could handle more service requests on a weekly basis. Customers realized increased satisfaction levels, due to speedier response times and proactive communication as to progress on the service request.