British Telecom Retail Selects WRQ to Improve Customer Service; WRQ Verastream Integrates BT Retail's Front- and Back-end Customer Service Systems.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 2003 New Single Screen Access Delivers Faster Customer Service Response Times British Telecom The telephone and communications carrier that provides services in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It used to be a division of the British Post Office, but was privatized in 1984 under Margaret Thatcher's administration. Retail, the provider of communications services to over 20 million residential and business customers in the UK, has announced the successful implementation of WRQ (WRQ, Inc., Seattle, WA, www.wrq.com) A software company that specialized in terminal emulation and NT-Unix integration products. Founded in 1981 as Walker Richer and Quinn, Inc., a consulting firm in minicomputer and mainframe applications, it introduced an HP terminal emulator for the Verastream(R) integration software. WRQ(R) has worked with BT Retail to integrate its Siebel For the tech company, see . Siebel, originally Flugzeugbau Halle, was a German aircraft manufacturer in Halle an der Saale. Siebel aircraft included:
As with many of today's customer contact centers, BT Retail faced the challenge of integrating its back- and front-end systems, including a mixture of UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). , HP and IBM mainframe IBM mainframes, though perceived as synonymous with mainframe computers in general due to their marketshare, are now technically and specifically IBM's line of business computers that can all trace their design evolution to the IBM System/360. systems. While orders for products and services are captured at the front-end with Siebel, the billing and maintenance applications reside on one mainframe and delivery and installation applications on another. This made overall visibility of the customer's solution difficult. Working with the host systems was therefore high-maintenance activity and accessing customer data could take a significant amount of time. BT Retail wanted a means to reduce costs and save this time, as well as improve its levels of customer service via faster response times and more efficient access to customer data. BT Retail selected WRQ Verastream based on its unobtrusive and cost-effective cost-effective, n the minimal expenditure of dollars, time, and other elements necessary to achieve the health care result deemed necessary and appropriate. method of making host assets more adaptable a·dapt·a·ble adj. Capable of adapting or of being adapted. a·dapt  a·bil . Verastream
is a complete host integration platform that requires no changes to host
code or associated business processes, thereby providing a quick time to
market.
Verastream allows all of the order information entered and held on BT Retail's Siebel front end to be made immediately available to the back-end systems, and vice versa VICE VERSA. On the contrary; on opposite sides. . The contact center representative is presented with all requested customer information on one screen, no matter its origin, at the click of a button. Implementing Verastream has also enabled BT Retail to reduce manual data entry requirements by increasing the amount of automation across a number of processes -- for example, sending engineers to various customer premises. Dave Rushton, BT Retail's technical design authority for tactical systems, says, "In BT Retail's domain, speed of response is a critical element of customer satisfaction. Business customers calling in with a problem can't afford to wait for contact center representatives to negotiate screens on multiple back-end systems during a phone call. They're losing money and patience while we're trying to resolve a fault. We need to spend that time building a relationship with the customer, and implementing WRQ Verastream has enabled us to address this balance. We've already seen customer satisfaction levels increase." Adds Rushton, "Verastream also provided results faster than previous integration attempts which were based on distributed-computing environments, remote-procedure calls and message-queue technologies." "A significant Verastream advantage is its incremental Additional or increased growth, bulk, quantity, number, or value; enlarged. Incremental cost is additional or increased cost of an item or service apart from its actual cost. approach to integration," says Shaun Wolfe, president and COO (Cell Of Origin) See mobile positioning. of WRQ. "It lets customers change individual business processes at their own pace, without tackling the entire IT infrastructure. Host systems are still a tremendous asset for organizations and the case of BT Retail is a great example of how businesses can make the most of their existing investments while meeting high standards of customer service. With a relatively small initial investment, BT Retail is reaping huge rewards." ABOUT BT RETAIL BT Retail is the UK's largest communications service provider A Communications Service Provider or CSP is a company that transports information electronically. The term encompasses public and private companies in the wireline, wireless, Internet, cable, satellite, and managed services businesses. , by market share, to the residential and business markets. It trades under one of the UK's leading brands -- BT -- and is the prime channel to market for the other businesses in the BT group. It supplies a wide range of communication products and services, including voice, data, Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the and multimedia services. It also offers a comprehensive range of managed and packaged communication solutions. ABOUT WRQ For 22 years, WRQ has been developing industry-leading software for simplifying host access and integration. WRQ Reflection(R) software connects web or Windows desktops to host applications, as well as file and print services. WRQ Verastream(R) software encapsulates host functionality into services for rapid reuse reuse - Using code developed for one application program in another application. Traditionally achieved using program libraries. Object-oriented programming offers reusability of code via its techniques of inheritance and genericity. in web applications, packaged applications, and portals. WRQ has the highest ratings in the technology sector for quality support and customer loyalty. With over six million users in 51 countries, it is one of the largest privately held software companies in the U.S. Four out of five Fortune 500 companies rely on WRQ daily. Access. Integrate. Transform.(TM) WRQ and WRQ products are trademarks or registered trademarks of WRQ, Inc. All other trademarks, trade names or company names referenced herein are used for identification only and are the property of their respective owners. |
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