The Florida Department of Revenue administers the tax obligations of nearly one million taxpayers in the state. Until recently, the Department worked with over twenty separate computer systems to track the 36 taxes and fees administered by the agency. Productivity was affected by the inability of agents to view a taxpayer’s complete tax activity in a single screen. At the Department’s call centers, agents could not easily match an incoming caller with any one of their individual tax records. The disparity in the databases resulted in duplication of efforts by agency employees and fragmented recordkeeping.

As part of a state-wide initiative to implement an enterprise resource system, the Department of Revenue deployed mySAP CRM. One of the project’s objectives was to consolidate the many databases into one, thereby integrating the data of all taxpayers’ accounts. For FDOR’s call centers, implementation of the Interaction Center in particular meant that agents would be able to view all of a taxpayer’s major obligations at a glance.

From a technology perspective, the call center also sought to implement advanced computer telephony integration that would allow the Department to leverage its existing Nortel DMS 100 phone switch. The final solution had to facilitate integration of the current switch with the SAP system.

Solution:

At FDOR, Hewlett Packard Consulting installed Cisco’s Intelligent Call Management (ICM) product, and integrated it with the Nortel DMS 100 CO switch that provides Centrex-based ACD service to the Department’s call centers throughout Florida. The Telecommunications group's primary objective in selecting the Cisco ICM product was the facilitation of enterprise CTI for all of the call centers running on the Nortel switch in Tallahassee, while not being restricted by a closed, proprietary or developer-unfriendly architecture. Enterprise-wide CTI enablement was a key requirement for the effective use of the mySAP CRM Interaction Center solution, which was being deployed at the same time. The ultimate goal for the CRM solution was to deliver data collected from the premise-based IVR systems and present that information to the SAP CRM agent upon call arrival. Support of the major Nortel switches allows Cisco ICM to manage the unique operation of the DMS 100 and process the events it creates. The missing link was how to deliver those events to the SAP system in order to retrieve data about the caller.

After HP completed the implementation of Cisco ICM's Enterprise CTI component, they collaborated with AMC Technology during the configuration and implementation of AMC’s Telephony Connector and mySAP CRM Interaction Center. The Telephony Connector translates the events created by the switch into function calls that can be understood by the SAP system. The result is simultaneous delivery of a screen pop on the agent’s desktop that identifies the incoming caller and attaches data retrieved from the database about that caller’s account.

AMC applied additional modifications to the Telephony Connector in order to support the Nortel DMS 100 in the call center’s environment. In addition, the Telephony Connector would serve as the translator that enables FDOR’s proprietary IVR system to talk to SAP. User-entered digits received by the IVR system, such as the taxpayer’s account number, can be used to match the caller with their account record stored in the SAP database.

Currently, the Department of Revenue has implemented this new system with 80 sales tax agents. As additional legacy systems are integrated into the SAP database, more agents will be CTI-enabled, resulting in greater efficiencies and improved productivity for the Department’s call centers.

"Our choice of the AMC Technology Telephony Connector was based largely on the fact that it is one of very few products that bridges the gap between CTI-enabled call center systems and SAP. Further, AMC's support of the Cisco ICM, which supported the DMS100 Centrex ACD, allowed us to work in a far less restrictive development environment than we've experienced with other middleware. We've successfully deployed the entire solution to our first tax group, and the resulting improvement in call processing time and agent ease-of-use has been significant.” Larry R. Nielsen, Systems Administrator, Florida Department of Revenue.

Results: