SUPPORT CENTER INC A Sue Conger University of Dallas Abstract Support Center Inc is a Call Center that conducts collections activity for its client companies SCI has suffered several outages over the last year that worry the new CIO The company has many IT issues to be addressed but continuity planning appears to be one that can be a quick win What should SCI do for continuity planning and how much should it spend Keywords ITIL IT Service Management Call Center Business Continuity Disaster Recovery Telecomm Management Introduction Support Center Inc SCI is a 400 million 190 person call center that operates two shifts Monday through Friday and half days on Saturday The Chief Information Officer CIO of the company Bob Wentworth is a new employee in charge of technology planning deployment and management Bob s job is to bring SCI s technology up to date and help them learn to better manage the phenomenal growth the company has experienced in the last two years As Bob delved into the company s problems he realized that the changes needed would be long term in development but that the company was suffering outages from which it had slow recoveries Bob decided that continuity planning for both the company and the IT organization were needed yet the issue of what to do and how much to spend required further analysis SCI History SCI is the amalgamation of three call center companies that each had its own area of expertise Somerfield Inc Charleston Associates and Telecomm Sales Inc Somerfield Inc the largest of the three and the company founded by Charles Somerfield the President and Chairman of SCI is a call center in the business of collecting past due accounts for companies in the telecommunications industry The Somerfield call center performed what are called 1 st Party collections during which the Customer Service Representatives CSRs act as employees of the telecomm company and follow scripts to collect the funds owed CSRs are paid a salary with Copyright 2008 Sue Conger Page 1 bonuses as they reach various collection plateaus The bonuses are considered incentives and to reach plateaus requires constant success in collections efforts Charleston Associates is a collections agency that collected 90 day and older accounts of any type In the SCI environment the CSRs are referred to as 3 rd Party collectors Third party CSRs do not follow a script and are allowed to use any legal and ethical means to collect money However there is no regulation of this industry and the means are rarely questioned especially when the amounts collected are substantial CSRs in this industry tend to be paid completely on commission that is a percentage of the funds they collect Telecomm Sales Inc was owned by James Ingles before the merger and is the third company on which SCI is based Telecomm is a 1st Party selling organization that sold products such as magazine subscriptions via sales calls that were guided by scripts Problems in this segment of the SCI business forced it to exit this market several months ago At the time it is discontinued selling accounted for 15 of sales but 30 of Call Center cost The companies merged two years ago as the owners were all friends who felt the synergies of the combined companies would be more profitable than the separate companies However that expectation has not happened Operational issues some of which relate to IT are perceived as keeping the new company from realizing expected benefits Bob Wentworth the new CIO had an illustrious Fortune 100 career as Chief Information Officers CIO and call center manager with over 4000 employees As CIO Bob s charge was to help the company better integrate its technology to become a strategic asset The merged SCI organization has had six CIOs in its two year existence The Information Technology organization IT is believed to be out of control because each CIO upon being hired had declared serious issues that they would then be unable to improve within three months of their hiring thus leading to their subsequent dismissal Bob s first task is to assess the state of technology determine the most serious shortcomings develop a plan to fix them and then begin the remediation Organization SCI is a casually run organization with no formal organization chart the diagram in Figure 1 depicts the organization structure as described by Bob Wentworth In general the major staff included the owner Charles Summerfield and his partners Jim Charleston and Jim Ingles Garth Page 2 Esterby the CFO who manages corporate finance and oversees accounting and IT Anne Paige manages accounting receivables with four people and payables with two people Bob Wentworth is the CIO with about 20 people in IT Gary Jones the Marketing Manager along with his staff of two and all of the partners develop business and sell SCI services Janice Barnes VP of Human Resources is responsible for a staff of four who hire fire and administer benefits Payroll is outsourced HR is an important job at SCI because they experience about 180 turnover in the call center annually Barnes reports to Ingles James Charleston managed the Call Center and Client Services Arlette Johnson is the manager of Customer Service Once a sale is made it is serviced and monitored by the 20 person Customer Service staff Steve McHenry manages the Call Center Steve manages about 190 customer service representatives CSRs and supervisors during a 15 hour workday The Call Center The Call Center is organized into two groups for 1 st party and 3rd party collections explained below The day shift is the larger of the two with 140 customer service representatives CSRs working four to eight hours each Ninety CSRs work the second shift The 1st party CSRs are grouped into four teams three teams for each of the major clients campaigns All four teams support all other clients The three largest clients provide about 70 of the billings while the other 1 800 clients provide the remaining 20 of the billings IT outages are immediately noticeable in the Call Center where 15 minutes of downtime is considered a significant problem Page 3 Start of Day At the beginning of the day the Dialer Administrator DA Juan initiates operation for the Davox dialer call dialer system Juan downloads client campaign information client payables via file transfer protocol FTP from the SCI web site queuing them for processing each day The Davox is initialized and the campaign information named and stored in anticipation of collection processing