Customer Vision:
BizWiki allows us
to distribute time
sensitive information
as well as facilitating
peer-topeer
exchanges of
information so that
everyone can both
share and benefit
from our own intellectual
capital.
— Tim Plimmer, Senior
Vice President
of Operations,
CDS.
Company Profile:
Company Name: Communications Data Services, a division of Hearst Corporation.
(www.cdsfulfillment.com)
Primary industry: Publishing Services
Size of Company: 3,000 Employees
Corporate Headquarters: Des Moines, IA
CDS, which provides fulfillment and data management services to publishers
including Conde Nast, Meredith, Rodale, Reader’s Digest and National
Geographic Books, has used BizWiki since December 2005. The company,
which operates 240 customer care sites for its different clients, has roughly
25 million subscriber names in its databases.
The company’s corporate offices are located in Des Moines, Iowa, with
branch-site locations in: Boone, Harlan, Red Oak, Tipton and Wilton, Iowa;
Bethlehem, Pa., and Prescott, Ariz. Additionally, CDS maintains an office in
New York City; owns Tower Publishing Services, Ltd., a United Kingdom
and Australian fulfillment company; and owns INDAS Limited, a Canadian
subscription and product fulfillment company located in Markham, Ontario,
and Montreal, Quebec.
CDS is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Hearst Corporation and employs
3,000 people worldwide.
The Hearst Corporation is one of the nation’s largest diversified communications
companies, with interests in: magazines; newspapers; books and
business publishing; television and radio stations; newspaper comics and
features syndication; cable television networks; television production and
syndication; and new media activities.
Information Resources Aren’t Current or
Complete:
As a leader in the magazine fulfillment industry with almost 3000 employees
in offices across the United States, CDS was faced with a number of content
management and knowledge sharing challenges. The first challenge
was improving methods for creating and sharing web-based information.
Challenge:
The current technologies employ a traditional repository model for finding,
sharing and delivering information, which is inefficient and doesn’t handle
just in time information needs.
CDS was looking for a solution to help its employees share relevant information
in a more efficient manner. CDS was particularly interested in improving
the distribution of internal information. In addition, CDS was interested
in finding methods to “front end� access to data living in disparate
databases and information silos, such as Lotus Notes.
“Our business is really highly information-driven,� said Tim Plimmer, CDS’
Senior Vice President of Operations. With operating centers in locations
spanning Bethlehem, Pa., to Prescott, Ariz., as well as six Iowa centers,
“we were always looking for better ways to populate pertinent information
about clients and services we perform and the nuances of their businesses
and be able to distribute that across multiple enterprises,� he said.
“Most operators know the policies, but the more intricate ones, or ones that
just came up – like if editorial content is causing a stir – the team gets a
message that there’s specific content for this. ‘Tell the reader this’ or ‘Send
it to editorial,’” says Plimmer. “We’re trying to take information that’s in
many people’s minds or may be in manuals and create a knowledge information
wiki repository that is dynamic and ever changing to meet our business
needs.”
CustomerVision BizWiki Delivers a Solution:
Plimmer determined that delivering information to employees via an Enterprise
Wiki would be a huge improvement over the existing data repository
methods. “It’s very easy to create, search for, edit and read wiki pages,” he
noted. In the evaluation process ease of administration was identified as
another essential requirement. The solution chosen had to be easy to administer
across the entire enterprise.
Plimmer chose CustomerVision BizWiki to handle the firm’s knowledge
sharing needs. The deployment began with the firm’s Customer Service,
Training and Marketing departments and has quickly expanded to the rest
of the company. The installation and implementation was straightforward
and easy, with core functionality working immediately and users were able
to learn the product without training. According to Plimmer,
“CustomerVision’s support team was very knowledgeable and professional.
They responded immediately when we had questions and resolved all our
issues.”
With CustomerVision’s assistance, Communications Data Services Inc. in
Des Moines implemented an internal wiki application in less than 30 days,
which it calls “Ask CDS,� in December. The world’s largest magazine sub-
scription fulfillment company, CDS services approximately 335 magazine
titles and 25 direct-marketing companies.
BizWiki is available to 1,800 employees in CDS operations – call centers,
mail processing, image scanning, e-mail customer service – at its 10 U.S.
sites as well as those in Canada, England and Australia. They use BizWiki
to inform their employees of the different protocols each publisher has for
handling subscriber inquiries.
Why CustomerVision?
CDS’s initial evaluation began with a variety of potential knowledge sharing
solutions. After evaluating several potential solutions Plimmer realized CustomerVision
had a number of advantages over competing solutions. CustomerVision
BizWiki is a hosted solution so it requires no desktop deployment,
because of its ease of use it requires no training, and new content is
generated without changing employees daily jobs. “We have offices nationwide
and almost 3000 potential users. Complex products which require a
manual install are becoming harder to justify as an enterprise solution due
to the cost of the installation and training and support,” he noted. With CustomerVision
CDS came across a hosted solution that didn’t require extensive
training or any installation requirements.
CustomerVision made it easy for administrators to create and manage
groups and access levels from a centralized location. The CustomerVision
administrator assigns users to groups and then can assign specific pages to
these groups. This results in these groups receiving just the information
they need to see. CustomerVision’s centralized user group/level assignment
functionality gives CDS the ability to assign relevant sections to
unique business units within the firm (e.g. Marketing Department, Customer
Service, Training, etc.) with no time required from its IT staff.
The system is easy to use and makes information more readily available
than it was previously with the Lotus Notes databases the company uses,
Plimmer says. “Employees knew information was somewhere but now they
can get to it by doing a Search and get a response in a matter of seconds,
or Ask the Expert function in BizWiki can help when an employee can’t find
the answer to a question they may not know who the expert is for a particular
system but within minutes a question is routed through CustomerVision
to a CDS knowledge expert who answers the question.” Plimmer says. “It
wouldn’t be something you can just look on the software vendor’s site to see
how it’s run” because the company writes most of its own systems.
After using it internally for several months among a few hundred of its operational
employees, “we’re impressed with the software,� Plimmer said.
“It’s doing what they said it would do and it’s filling a need we have for distribution
and collaboration of information that’s critical to operating our business.�
The Future:
CDS is so happy with BizWiki that in the next couple months it plans
to expand its use to its client service department to interact with publishers.
CDS also plans to run a pilot program with the software in the next six
months for a new type of communication between a magazine and its readers.
Plimmer imagines that a niche publisher or marketer, say a gardening or
cooking magazine, would include the Ask the Expert function on the Frequently
Asked Questions page of its Web site where readers could inquire
about planting azaleas in the shade, for instance. “So if one of our clients
that publish gardening magazines has a reader with a question about lilies
and can’t find it on their Web site, they can post this question,� Plimmer
said. “The software will then route it based on subject matter experts, who
will then respond back to the consumer. If that’s a highly asked question, it
would (move) up to the top, so when you went to the FAQs, that would be
one of the first things you would see.�
“Our thinking is that it’s another opportunity for our clients to brand their
products with their customers and make them a source for information that
their subscribers will come back to,” Plimmer says. “In the publishing industry,
renewals are king and you want to provide that value.”
CDS plans to begin introducing an external wiki to its clients as well as to its
parent company, Hearst Corp., within the next three to six months, he said.
“The software’s interactive Web capabilities may provide added revenue
streams for CDS’s clients, or at the very least better position them as customer-
service-driven companies that will stick out in customers’ minds when
the time comes to renew their magazine subscriptions,” Plimmer said.
The Return on Investment
- CDS feels they have experienced call time reduction and expects to
measure this in the upcoming 6 months. Current statistics 3 million
emails per year and 9.2M phone calls, so if we dropped 25% average
contact time by 30 seconds, at a $1/contact savings = $3.05M. - Creating new articles from emails, of the 566 pages over 100 have
been created from “Ask the Expert”, which reduces the future contact
exponentially, assuming each new article save only 2 emails and answer
the time and cost savings would be approximately, $3,000 over a
3 month period. - Reduction in time spent during client marketing and sales contacts due
to quick search and availability of data and information.
