SAN JOSE, Calif. - January 25, 2000 - Cisco Systems, Inc., today announced that JCPenney Direct Marketing Services, a JCPenney wholly-owned subsidiary, which markets supplemental insurance and an array of membership services worldwide, has enhanced customer service while growing its business by deploying Cisco ICM software. Utilizing the system's network-to-desktop CTI capabilities is enabling JCPenney DMS to effectively segment customers through IVR and database integration, route each customer to the optimum answering resource anywhere in the enterprise, and deliver individual customer-profile data to customer service representatives to enable them to provide quality service. JCPenney Direct Marketing Services, based in Plano, Texas, has more than 15 million insurance policies in force, and revenues of $1.2 billion.
"Companies like JCPenney are leap-frogging the industry by using technology in innovative ways to best serve their customers," said Jane Eisenberg, director of marketing for the Customer Contact Business Unit in Cisco's Applications Technology Group. "We are pleased that they have selected Cisco ICM software as the foundation for their intelligent contact management capabilities and look forward to continuing our partnership as they incorporate other customer communication mediums into their multimedia contact center architecture."
The desktop application, which was designed and developed by a JCPenney employee in less than five weeks, is designed to automate the customer-identification and data-retrieval processes.
"We installed Cisco desktop functionality in our three call centers, which employ 850 representatives and process ten million calls annually, in just three months," commented Jeff Camp, vice president of customer service for JCPenney DMS. "It amazed a lot of people here how fast it went in-both in terms of our previous experience with CTI, and the size of the installation. After the ICM system's CTI functionality was implemented, representative talk time was reduced, on average, by 15 seconds per call."
Going forward, JCPenney Direct Marketing Services plans to implement additional caller-segmentation capabilities in order to further improve and customize the service experience for each individual customer. The group is also looking at integrating Web and e-mail transactions into its call center environment and recently purchased Cisco eMail Manager.
"We want to get to the point where our inbound customer contacts are completely managed by our intelligent contact management application, such that we can connect any customer to an appropriately skilled representative without manual intervention," added Camp. "Regardless of whether it's snail mail that comes through an imaging application, an email message, a Web contact, or an inbound call, we want to be able to virtually queue the contact and use skills-based routing to get it to the right customer service person the first time, every time."
