Change to SAP Gives Better Customer Service in Bilka

Visual manageability with everything in one screenshot gives 40 employees in Dansk Supermarked’s call center better working conditions. Now customers get an answer to the most frequently asked questions straight away. Dansk Supermarked took on the task of developing it with the help of itelligence and the use of SAP NetWeaver Business Client.

2,500 calls and 2,500 emails, that is what Dansk Supermarked’s online customer service center get every week. 50 employees in total and 40 in the call center cover the opening hours from 7 to 22 every day of the week, and they must deliver good service to online customers.

The questions usually concern the e-commerce on the website Bilka.dk, they also get inquiries concerning Føtex.dk, Swipbox or products ordered physically in the shops. Has the product been delivered? Does it come in blue? Can I change the delivery address? These and many other questions demand fast access to tracking the order and the customer in Dansk Supermarked’s ERP system. The call center has as its goal that no customer waits more than 60 seconds on the phone, and at the same time the customer must get replies to all his or her questions at once. That is why the employees in the Service Center should not have to look up the different details in more than one place in order to find the answers to the customers’ questions.

“Speed and precision are absolutely pivotal for good customer service. We have some great employees who answer the phone and they’re excellent at understanding the customers’ questions. But it must be easy for them to navigate our “backoffice”, so they can solve the problem for the customer. A huge part of the job is about locating data in the ERP system”, says Hanne Rything Køppen, Customer Service Manager in Dansk Supermarked Online.

Apollo with a Facelift

Dansk Supermarked is a very large retail chain that performs really well. The online business is new “naughty boy” in the class, which in just a few years has grown from nothing to having a three digit million turnover. The retail giant expects further growth within e-commerce in the future, as more online search- and buying options find their way into the shops via smartphones and tablets. That is why it was widely agreed that the employees in the call center needed the very best interface to the SAP system, which is the future ERP system for the whole Group. As still more product categories are moved from the old ERP system to SAP, the easy access to data will become even more important for the everyday life in the call centre. SAP roll out in the Group has been given the project name “Apollo”.

“Quickly, we saw the need for a new interface for the online customer service, and we already had a great contact to itelligence, so it was an obvious choice to use them for this project”, says Tina Lykke Kristensen, who is the project leader connected to Apollo. Dansk Supermarked chose not to use SAP’s standard solution for order management and call center.

Instead, the ”facelift” to the SAP module Sales & distribution has been done with SAP NetWeaver Business Client in collaboration with NTT DATA Business Solutions. The collaboration started with a thorough pre-analysis, during which the consultants from NTT DATA Business Solutions really got to know the everyday life of the employees in the call center “We have experienced skilled and attentive consultants, who went the extra mile in order to understand our needs. At the same time, they had new ideas and experience which made an easy job of creating a user-friendly, manageable and fast access to all relevant information in SAP. The result is promising and we can’t wait to start using it”, says Hanne Rything Køppen, Customer Service Manager in Dansk Supermarked.

Agile Way of Working

The Customer Service Department was an active part of the entire development process, because the developers had weekly status meetings with representatives for the end-users. Based on 10 user stories – that is typical tasks in Customer Service – the interface was developed to ease the everyday life in the call centre. The use old SAP NetWeaver Business Client and the weekly dialogue meetings meant that the project was really efficient. Dansk Supermarked achieved their goals on time and on budget. The programming itself was done in collaboration between itelligence and Dansk Supermarked.

“I’m really happy about the end result. Our order list (POWL list) gives a total overview into the order status and history. You don’t need to click 17 times to answer a customer inquiry, and if detailed knowledge is needed, links are available in the list. The tool is intuitive and easy to work with. You can write and search like in a web-browser”, says process expert Hanne Hansen from the IT function at Dansk Supermarked.