Knoa End-User Experience Management Helps BT Drive Top-line Revenue and Enhance Customer Experience while Reducing Application Support Costs

British Telecom (BT) a provider of communications solutions and services has deployed the Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) suite to optimize the performance of Siebel CRM and other enterprise applications within its global organization.

BT's Retail Division turned to Knoa prior to undertaking an ambitious upgrade of its Customer Management Platform, operating on Siebel software. As a requirement of the upgrade, business managers sought greater visibility into the effectiveness and adoption rates of the Customer Management Platform, including an accurate gauge of business critical measures such as call center handling times and user adoption rates.

Knoa EPM monitors application execution from the perspective of the end-user, and provides precise metrics about the user experience as well as measurements on how people interact with software applications. The software delivers the most accurate metrics possible on the performance of the application, and an unprecedented level of visibility into the actual performance of the end users.

The Knoa EPM suite is an end-user management solution designed to optimize both application and end-user performance. Knoa EPM provides total end-user monitoring coverage for enterprise applications, such as SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Siebel CRM, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft Enterprise Suite, as well as many other application vendors and custom applications.

Knoa EPM enables BT Retail Division to drive consistently high revenue generation from each customer service agent by enabling the IT Team to identify and focus on the highest priority issues that are affecting agent productivity, customer experience or effective process execution. Knoa EPM metrics help the team determine where to apply corrective remediation in real time for the maximum business results.

"BT evaluated other user performance applications but found these did not record individual transaction navigation or response time without significant development costs," said Stuart Smith, Director CRM Performance at BT. "Without requiring any configuration or extensive set-up, Knoa EPM captures real end-user response times, ecosystem and application errors, and user behavior. This visibility enables us to uncover and resolve problems that would have extended transaction times and impacted end-user efficiencies in the past."

Knoa EPM has proven an effective resource for decision making about BT's IT investments by capturing important data such as key metrics about software upgrades; delivery of an acceptable user experience; effective execution of key processes and user productivity and employee training. Since implementation of Knoa EPM, BT has seen significant ROI, both quantitative and qualitative including:

• The migration from legacy systems to Siebel CRM system in a timely, cost effective and efficient manner. Six thousand new users were brought online in just over three months, nearly doubling the size of the user population without a corresponding increase in support staff.

• Improvements in call center agent productivity. By comparing user behavior at one high performing call center to another, BT was able to identify very specific end-user behaviors that improved productivity for hundreds of advisors by 25 percent, a productivity improvement worth approximately $3 million.

• Improved productivity due to the rapid identification of technological bottlenecks. Knoa EPM highlighted that BT needed to increase capacity of more than 600 desktops. The uplift enabled an increase in response times--twice as fast--and increased application uptime, which enabled a 10% increase in productivity for BT's business service advisors. BT estimated the revenue protected by rapid resolution of this application performance problem to be over $2 million.

• Reduction in the cost of managing application performance by approximately roughly $300,000 per year. Knoa EPM is able to identify that 25 percent of reported problems are not real application performance issues. Real issues are resolved 25 percent faster and comprehensive data presented by Knoa has obviated the majority of on-site support visits.

"For true customer-centricity, organizations need to leverage a tireless focus on improving customer experiences and in aligning to customer-intents," said Isher Kaila, Research Director, Gartner. "Performance management and the ability of enterprises to select actionable and appropriate metrics for their CRM initiatives distinguish those firms that achieve CRM success, from those that struggle when deploying a CRM solution. Accelerating end-user adoption of CRM products along with a consistency of that end-user experience will be paramount in deploying successful CRM applications, and in management of transformational CRM change."

"We had been looking to deploy a response time monitoring tool, when we evaluated Knoa EPM, which monitors the complete user experience," said Stuart Smith. "Knoa gives us insight into actual end-user experience that provides benefits across the board, helping target response time issues, solve end-user problems faster, identify usage and adoption issues, and even make priority decisions on ongoing application investments."