Group Victoria (Project of automation of customer support)

The project of automation of a support service in Victoria group included:

• organization of service Service Desk;

• creation of call center for acceptance and processing of calls from outlets;

• automation incident management process.

Profile of activity of the enterprise

The Victoria group (www.victoria-group.ru) is included into 10 largest retail operators of Russia, in 2004 its goods turnover made 377 million dollars. The group possesses 72 Kvartal shops and 39 discounters "Cheap" in Moscow, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg and Vladimir. Also in Kaliningrad the group possesses four supermarkets "Victoria" and one shop of the cash&carry format.

IT infrastructure of holding is characterized by a big territorial scope and complexity, it includes a retail store equipment, data networks, Axapta Retail ERP system, computers, the office equipment, etc.

Implementation purposes

High-quality work of IT department is crucial for business development of Victoria Group since it directly influences growth of turnover and the general controllability of holding. Specialists of IT department should solve quickly problems of automation of new shops and provide technical support of corporate users.

With expansion of retail networks and growth of amount of requests from users quality management of support became the most sensitive issue in the IT strategy of holding. It was required to create "single window" for acceptance of addresses of users, to increase the speed of reaction to addresses, to reduce time of failure handling and malfunctions and also to reveal standard problems and to optimize costs for their permission.

The newly created service Service Desk had to be engaged in the solution of these tasks, for automation of its work specialists of Victoria Group selected the Naumen Service Desk software product. Under the terms of the contract the NAUMEN company had to implement the complex project including control automation by incidents and processing of phone calls in a support service.

Project Progress

During the project specialists of NAUMEN company carried out works on installation and a software setup, provided training of employees of a support service. Implementation of the first stage of the project took 2.5 months, at the beginning of August, 2005 systems were brought into trial operation.

Project Results

Based on the Naumen Service Desk 2.2 system jobs of support engineers were automated. The Naumen Service Desk system provided them with an opportunity:

• keep account and classification of incidents;

• issue dresses to contractors and control their accomplishment;

• control observance of procedural terms;

• conduct history of requests for permission of conflict situations;

• analyze origins of incidents and reveal standard problems.

During an implementation project the uniform directory of IT services on which support is given was created. The directory is stored in the Naumen Service Desk database that allows to fix disabled service at registration of an incident and to appropriate to a request appropriate level of a priority. In the Naumen Service Desk system account of requests in department of operation is also kept and their accomplishment is controlled.

Call acceptance and registration of requests are executed by operators of a support service, their jobs are equipped with the program Naumen SoftPhone phones with a possibility of registration of requests and search in the database. Distribution of calls, balancing of loading between operators and collecting of statistics about work of call center provides the solution IP call center of Naumen Phone 3.0.

Project perspectives

At the second stage of the project the support service is going to automate configuration management of the equipment and software, management of scheduled works and works on automation of new shops. It is planned that by the end of the year call center operators will accept and register requests of the corporate users who are outside Moscow and the Moscow region.