Stationery giant makes savings with fax server and Unified Messaging solutions
Office Depot unified messaging for their sales team, so they can now pick up all messages remotely and easily connect with their customers.
They also replaced manual faxing in the Customer Service Centre with electronic fax, saving them £1,000 a week in fax maintenance costs at each of their 25 office locations.
The Customer:
Office Depot is the country’s leading contract supplier of office products – computer consumables, print management, office furnishings etc. The company’s well-known own brand, Niceday, is widely recognised for value and quality.
Office Depot has multiple UK locations and major customers include BT, Lloyds TSB and many local councils and NHS trusts.
The Challenges:
The Telecommunications team based in Andover, Hampshire, is responsible for the company’s communications. There was a requirement for them to:
Improve Communications
Office Depot has a large mobile sales team. To improve communications with their customers when they were out of the office, it was essential to streamline their messaging functionality to give them better access to all messages.
Update the manual fax system used for receiving Purchase Orders and issuing invoices
At Office Depot’s Andover Customer Service Centre alone, 28 fax machines were in constant use, taking thousands of orders every day – a system which was proving labour intensive and very costly.
The Solution:
To improve communications, ProcessFlows supplied Office Depot with an AVST CallXpress Unified Messaging solution and an SMS messaging platform, Text Message Server (TMS) to facilitate text messaging.
The CallXpress Unified Communications platform brings together all messages in one place, making them easily accessible remotely.
TMS is an ‘out of the box’ platform independent SMS solution for business users. Integration with existing line of business systems and Outlook gives users the ability to send/receive messages to all contacts – staff, customers and suppliers – by email, to either individual, or global groups of text numbers.
To replace manual faxing in the Customer Service Centre, ProcessFlows installed and integrated OpenText RightFax with Microsoft Exchange. RightFax allows customers to fax their orders in the same way as before, but enables Office Depot to receive them electronically, leading to impressive savings in time and overheads.
A ProcessFlows SAP connector further integrates RightFax with their financial systems, so invoices can be sent out by fax, rather than post, enabling greater savings in paper, print, preparation and post.
The SAP connector also allows other documentation, such as Proof of Delivery (POD), order queries and copy invoices to be generated and transmitted directly from the main system.
“The sales team like the system and it does what it says – unifies communications. We offer a fantastic response to our customers and it is very unusual for something to go wrong.”
The Benefits:
CallXpress has revolutionised communications within the sales team. They now have remote access to all their messages and TMS allows mobile staff to receive a text alert whenever there is an important message for them.
TMS is also being used to ‘baby sit’ the company’s UK computer network 24/7 by sending an automatic alert to the on-call IT staff if there is a technical problem, removing the need to retain engineers on duty overnight.
RightFax allowed Office Depot to dispose of most of its fax machines straight away, which gave an immediate saving of approximately £1,000 a week in maintenance costs at each location.
Better use of staff time has improved efficiencies and customer service. Staff working in the Customer Service Centre have seen their workload reduce, allowing them to spend more time processing orders, with a corresponding increase in speed of despatch and accuracy.
ProcessFlows solutions are all scaleable. They can be built on as the needs of the business grow – maximising investment in the technology, increasing functionality and further saving costs.
Support and Training:
Office Depot have been impressed by the simplicity and user-friendliness of the ProcessFlows products. Rob says: “We have never had to train anyone – they have a single-page user guide to get them started, then there is an electronic user guide they can consult if they need to know more.”
The Future:
ProcessFlows continue to work with Office Depot to help the company obtain further value from its investment. Projects currently under
way should make it possible to:
- Electronically read incoming faxes for product bar codes and scan them into the ordering system to be processed
- Further automate business processes and achieve electronic delivery of more outbound documentation
- Integrate fully with the company’s Xerox machines, allowing even more fax machines to be consigned to the skip.
“All of these products really go a long way in ensuring that we continue to meet the high standards of service that our customers have come to expect.”
Rob Dore, Telecommunications Analyst
More information
For information on any of our solutions or products, please call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@processflows.co.uk.
