In the past, sales representatives who work at Dell call centers used as many as 40 different information systems to understand customers and meet their needs, which limited their ability to deliver an optimal customer experience. To address that challenge, Dell built the Integrated Dell™ Desktop (IDD), a smart client solution based on Microsoft® software. IDD provides everything that Dell sales representatives need to assist customers and sell the company’s products within a single, easy-to-use desktop application—one designed from the ground up to support the sales process and optimize call center operations. Currently rolled out to more than 8,000 desktops at nine locations, the IDD smart client is helping deliver decreases in average call duration of 10 percent or more, a 45 percent decrease in training time, and improved profit per sale.

Situation

Founded in 1984, Dell is a premier global provider of technology products and services. The company’s climb to market leadership is the result of a persistent focus on delivering the best possible customer experience through a direct sales model—based on the belief that by connecting directly with customers, Dell can best understand their needs and provide more effective solutions. “Customer experience is what differentiates Dell from others in our industry,” says Michael Dell, Chairman of the Board. “The evolution of our direct sales model has paved a very efficient way to reach our customers.”

With the direct model, there are no retailers to add unnecessary time and costs, or to diminish the company’s understanding of customer expectations. Dell builds every system to order, giving its customers greater choice and solutions that are customized to their needs. The direct model enables Dell to introduce new products and technologies much faster than competitors that rely on indirect sales channels.

To support its business model, Dell has become a leader in operational efficiency, reducing costs and passing those savings on to customers in the form of greater value. Dell has invested heavily in its core business systems to achieve that competitive edge, leveraging information technology to scale its business to U.S.$47.3 billion in annual sales. As such, the company’s continued growth depends in part on how well it can use the capabilities of those systems to improve the customer experience—and to do so in a way that reinforces the unique value that only Dell can offer.

For Dell, the customer purchasing experience is driven through two primary channels: Dell.com, the company’s global e-commerce presence; and its worldwide call centers, which are staffed with sales representatives who help callers configure and order systems. Since launching Dell.com close to a decade ago, the company has worked to optimize the online experience—a key component of its strategy to enhance and broaden the fundamental advantages of its direct sales model by applying the efficiencies of the Internet. Dell is consistently recognized as a world leader in e-commerce.

Customer experience is what differentiates Dell from others in our industry. The evolution of our direct sales model has paved a very efficient way to reach our customers.  Michael Dell Chairman of the Board, Dell

In the past, Dell sales representatives had to use as many as 40 different information systems to get an accurate picture of customer needs and how to best address them, manually toggling between a customer’s online shopping cart, order history, support history, and so on. And while some of the tools were Web based, key tasks such as configuring a system, generating a quote, and placing an order were done using a text-based interface that required sales representatives to enter a complex series of alphanumeric codes for system components.

Says Michael Rosenstein, Director of Consumer E-Business at Dell, “In working to optimize our call centers, we focus on efficient call handling, the stability of our environment, and making sure that our sales representatives are well trained and helpful. But instead of an integrated sales tool, what we had was an order management tool and several other stand-alone systems that were used by sales.”

Solution

The Integrated Dell™Desktop (IDD), based on Microsoft® software, provides everything that sales representatives need to assist customers and sell the company’s products. Instead of having to toggle between several stand-alone systems, users of IDD can work within a single, easy-to-use desktop application that is designed from the ground up to support the sales process and optimize call center operations.

IDD marks Dell’s first enterprise deployment of a smart client application—an easily deployed and managed computer program that runs on a user’s local device (in this case, Dell desktop PCs) and intelligently connects to other systems. By taking advantage of the device’s local resources such as processing power, memory, disk storage, and peripherals, the smart client can deliver a user experience that is richer, more responsive, more adaptive, and ultimately more productive than what is possible with a Web browser–based interface.

Web services have had a big impact at Dell, and .NET technologies make deploying Web services easier.  Susan Sheskey IT Vice President, Global Sales, Services and Supply Chain Management, Dell

“The Microsoft vision of everything being connected is directly in line with where we want to take Dell in the future—and Web services, deployed on .NET technology, will help us succeed,” says Michael Dell.

Adds Gregg Hansen, Senior Manager of Application Development for Sales and Marketing Systems at Dell, “The IDD smart client has helped us more closely align our technology infrastructure with our business goals. Microsoft provides the best tool set for building smart client applications. We couldn’t have achieved as much on any other platform.”

Integrated Sales Tool

In building IDD, Dell had several business goals: an improved customer experience, decreased training time, reduced average call duration, increased sales close rate, and better profitability. IDD helps achieve all those goals by integrating with the company’s back-end systems using Web services and putting the functionality of those systems at the fingertips of sales representatives through a desktop application designed to optimize the sales process.

Key capabilities of IDD include:

• Automatic retrieval of all customer data. IDD gives Dell sales representatives a holistic view of the customer relationship from the moment that they pick up the phone. Many sales are to repeat customers, with whom the company already has a history of quotes, orders, notes, and correspondence. Before IDD, Dell sales representatives had to manually search multiple systems to get a complete picture of the customer relationship, which led to increased call times. IDD virtually eliminates that delay by connecting with the call routing system to determine the caller’s phone number, using that phone number to retrieve customer history from multiple sources, and displaying that history in a consolidated format at the start of a call.
• Segmentation and scripting. After a customer’s purchase and support history is retrieved, IDD combines that data with other information to generate suggestions for how the sales representative may be able to best meet that customer’s individual needs.
• Needs-based recommendation engine. IDD includes a recommendation engine that guides sales representatives in asking the customer a short series of questions, upon which IDD will recommend a system configuration that best meets customer requirements while optimizing profitability.
• Streamlined product configuration. In the past, sales representatives configured systems by entering alphanumeric codes into one screen, clicking Submit, and viewing the effects that those options had on lead-time and margin in another screen. In IDD, configuration of systems is done through a graphical interface that is similar to what customers see on Dell.com, with the exception that lead times and margin display in real time as options are changed. Existing orders can be changed on the fly, instead of having to be deleted and rebuilt as in the past.
• Integration with Dell.com. With IDD, sales representatives see the same content that customers see on Dell.com, helping salespeople better understand the customers’ perspective and the questions that they may have. In addition, IDD enables sales representatives to import system configurations that customers create on Dell.com and pick up the configuration process at the point that the customer left off, instead of having to capture the same information verbally and configure a system from scratch. IDD integrates several other capabilities that support the sales process, including call center queue management, contact management and callback scheduling, phone extension lookup and forwarding, credit approval, and sales reporting. And IDD supports up to six concurrent sessions, allowing sales representatives to switch between customers with a single mouse click and have all user interface components track to the active customer. Before IDD, sales representatives had several Web browser instances open for each customer.

Adoption of Web Services

IDD marks the latest step in Dell’s use of Microsoft .NET technology to drive improvements in operational efficiency and better serve its customer base. Dell’s widespread adoption of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework began a few years ago, when the company launched a pilot project to evaluate the effectiveness of Web services as a way to improve the quality of the online customer experience. Using Web services, Dell unlocked the power of its business systems and extended their functionality to:

• Expose real-time product and pricing information to partners. Customers can research, configure, and compare the systems provided by different manufacturers on Web sites such as Yahoo!, C|Net, and ZDNet. For Dell, whose product configuration engine is at the heart of its e commerce operations, the challenge was in how to provide those partner sites with real-time configuration and pricing data, in turn giving potential customers more accurate and timely information about Dell products. The company realized that goal by exposing its configuration engine as a Web service, thus allowing partners to programmatically access it in real time and integrate its functionality into their Web sites.
• Deliver a more informed purchasing experience. Providing accurate tax and shipping costs as customers shop on Dell.com is an important driver in converting browsers to buyers. The challenge was in how to provide customers with state-specific tax calculation and postal code–specific shipping cost information in real time, allowing customers to monitor the total cost of their order throughout the shopping process instead of having to wait until checkout. Dell provides access to the systems that calculate tax and shipping costs through Web services, which are called by the company’s Web servers to recalculate that data whenever a customer adds, deletes, or changes an item while shopping on Dell.com.
• Provide post-purchase tracking and shipping status. The cornerstone of the Dell customer experience is the ability to get a custom-built system for the best value with industry-leading service and support. To drive customer satisfaction and reduce the workload at its call centers, Dell provided access to its order management, manufacturing, and fulfillment systems as Web services, which it uses to provide customers with real-time visibility into their orders—from purchase through delivery—by e-mail and on Dell.com.

Initial success with Web services rapidly led to the use of Microsoft .NET technology for several additional projects, with the goal of integrating many other systems in the same way. “Regardless of how a system may work internally, we provide access to its functionality as a Web service so that those capabilities can be leveraged by other systems,” says Hansen. “The entire checkout process on Dell.com is driven by Web services.”

Adds Susan Sheskey, IT Vice President, Global Sales, Services and Supply Chain Management at Dell, “Web services have had a big impact at Dell, and .NET technologies make deploying Web services easier.

Historically, our IT staff had to deal with isolated, proprietary software solutions. With Web services, we can develop our systems once and design them to be deployable and adaptable all over the world. This approach enables us to be more responsive to our growing business.”

Development and Rollout

The IDD smart client is Dell’s second iteration of a consolidated sales tool. In the first iteration, Dell attempted to realize the same

The Integrated Dell Desktop provides the information and tools that sales representatives need to better understand and meet customer needs—and it does so in a way that is tailored to the sales process.  Name Michael Rosenstein, Director of Consumer E Business, Dell

Development of the current IDD architecture began in March 2003, when a small team from Dell began to work with the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Architecture Team to investigate a smart client approach. Beginning with the Microsoft Contact Center Framework, a reference architecture for the development and deployment of call center solutions, developers from both companies built a proof of concept that showed how a smart client could meet all design goals: integration with call routing and other systems, a rich user interface, ease of development, and a smooth deployment and update process. Full-scale development began in October 2003 and was finished by mid-December—a short 10 weeks later. Deployment began in March 2004, with the company rolling out the solution at the rate of one to two locations per week. Today, IDD is deployed to 8,000 desktops at the Dell call centers that handle the company’s domestic sales. It supports all Dell consumer sales, 90 percent of transactional small-business sales (sales where the customer does not have a dedicated Dell sales representative), and a part of the company’s small-business relationship—based sales (where the customer has a dedicated salesperson). Dell plans to continue the deployment of IDD in support of additional business segments.

Architecture

IDD consists of two primary components: the IDD smart client, and a service layer that exposes the capabilities of core business systems as Web services. Both components were developed using the Visual Studio .NET 2003 development system. The smart client resides on Dell OptiPlex™ desktop PCs that run the Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system. The service layer and many of the business systems that it exposes reside on Dell PowerEdge™ 6650 servers that run Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, including the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and SQL Server™ 2000.

Figure 1. The IDD smart client provides Dell sales representatives with a cross channel view of all customer interactions.

Unlike traditional client/server solutions, in which the client application must know how to access information on the server, the IDD smart client need only request what it needs from other systems, without regard to how that request is met. A good example of this is when IDD requests all customer data at the start of a call. In a client/server model, the client would need to know which databases store customer information, the queries required to access each database, and how to correlate the data. In contrast, the IDD smart client simply captures the caller’s phone number from the call routing system and calls a Web service, requesting that it “retrieve all history on the customer associated with the provided phone number.”

In the beginning, some people were cautious of the smart client approach, recalling the inherent fragility of early solutions based on a client/server computing model—an architectural drawback that a loosely coupled approach based on Web services helps overcome. Today, with IDD working as intended and delivering measurable results, support for the smart client approach is growing. Based on strong results that Dell has seen so far and the lack of any major issues, the company has decided to accelerate its rollout of IDD across Europe by a full year.

Benefits

Through its deep integration with core business systems and ease of use, the Integrated Dell Desktop is helping the company’s sales representatives work more efficiently and effectively. Its success is validated by substantial improvements in many of the

The IDD smart client has helped us more closely align our technology infrastructure with our business goals.  Gregg Hansen Senior Manager, Application Development, Sales and Marketing Systems, Dell

“The Integrated Dell Desktop provides the information and tools that sales representatives need to better understand and meet customer needs—and it does so in a way that is tailored to the sales process,” says Rosenstein. “By helping us better understand our customers and more efficiently meet their needs, the IDD solution is helping Dell achieve better business results.”

Adds Sheskey, “We can significantly differentiate Dell in the marketplace through the use of information technology. And we’ve done that by being early adopters of standards-based technologies and by focusing on tools and capabilities like Microsoft .NET technology and Web services. This solid collaboration between Dell and Microsoft is propelling our business forward and helping distinguish Dell in the marketplace.”

Improved Customer Experience

For Dell, the greatest benefit provided by IDD is an improved customer experience, especially for those customers with whom Dell already has a business relationship. From the moment that an existing customer is connected to a sales representative, IDD provides that sales representative with a complete picture of previous customer interactions that includes all quotes, orders, notes, correspondence, and service calls. Customers no longer must provide that data verbally or wait for a sales representative to search for it. Instead, they are connected with a Dell representative who can greet them by name, knows their history with Dell, and is immediately prepared to meet whatever new needs they may have.

IDD also improves the customer experience by not requiring customers to provide information that they already have entered on Dell.com, such as saved system configurations. Instead, the sales representative can import that information into IDD and begin to provide assistance at the point where the customer left off. Furthermore, IDD uses the same configuration engine and displays the same content that the customer sees on Dell.com. So sales representatives are better able to understand the customer’s perspective, answer questions, and guide the caller through any remaining decisions that must be made before placing an order.

Improvement in Sales Margin

Through features like its needs-based recommendation engine and real-time margin calculation, IDD helps sales representatives sell more strategically and deliver better margins, in turn leading to increased profitability. Sales representatives are able to focus first and foremost on configuring a system that best meets customer needs, relying on IDD to provide near-real-time visibility into the company’s supply chain and the rapidly changing cost of system components.

10 Percent Reduction in Average Call Duration

In the past, when sales representatives had to use the text-based system to configure systems, their primary role was order

The IDD smart client helps me be more productive because it’s tailored to the way I work.  Name Anagha Aji, Sales Coach, Dell Home Systems, Dell

Of that timesavings, Dell attributes roughly one-third to features of IDD that would not have been possible without a smart client architecture, such as integration with the telephony system and a more responsive user interface. “Web solutions require constant roundtrips to the server, at a cost of a few seconds each,” says Hansen. “Add up all those small delays over the course of a fairly complex customer interaction and multiply by hundreds of thousands of such interactions per day, and you’re looking at a huge amount of wasted time and money. The IDD smart client helps avoid that inefficiency by retrieving data once and using it locally for the duration of a call—a beneficial side effect being that it reduces bandwidth usage and allows us to support remote call centers with minimal performance degradation and telecommunications costs.”

Reduced Training Time and Accelerated Sales Performance

In the Dell consumer segment, system sales are strongest during the holiday shopping season, which lasts from October until mid-December. That seasonality drives the need for Dell to train a large temporary sales force every year—a business need whose cost is highly proportional to the cost of training those seasonal resources. Prior to IDD, new sales representatives were trained on the text-based order entry system for a minimum of 7 days and required an additional 90 days to deliver sales margins that were comparable to their peers. Today, they receive two days of training on IDD and are hitting margin goals in only four to six weeks.

“The IDD solution has reduced total training time for new agents by 45 percent,” says Rosenstein. “And it decreases the time it takes for new sales representatives to perform at levels that are comparable to their peers by 50 to 65 percent. In many locations, we rolled it out to groups of users without the need for any training—it’s that intuitive and easy to use. We had budgeted for training, but in many cases it just wasn’t required. Not only does IDD enable us to ramp up our seasonal sales force far more cost-effectively, but it also eases the cost of attrition for permanent staff.”

Improved Sales Representative Satisfaction

Dell also expects IDD to reduce training costs by providing the tools that sales representatives need to be more successful, in turn leading to improved employee satisfaction and lower attrition rates. “The IDD smart client helps me be more productive because it’s

By helping us better understand our customers and more efficiently meet their needs, the IDD solution is helping Dell achieve better business results.  Michael Rosenstein Director of Consumer E Business, Dell

The user experience has been just as positive for Zach Weigel, who recently transferred into a relationship-sales role in the Dell Small and Medium Business group. In his new role, Weigel serves some 180 customers across 20 accounts, spending half of his time taking calls and the other half following up with customers.

“IDD is a lot more user friendly than our old Web-based environment—I can do everything faster and don’t need to take as much of a customer’s time,” Weigel says. “With our old system, it took 5 to 10 minutes to build a quote—something that I do several dozen times per day. With IDD, I can build a quote in 30 to 45 seconds and send it to the customer while talking to him on the phone, possibly closing the sale in a single call. And the ability to import a shopping cart from Dell.com is a huge benefit when selling to technical professionals, who typically know exactly what they want and most likely already have it configured. IDD is a great tool, and I’m glad to have it. When you’re confident in your tools, that confidence shows on the phone and is reflected in your performance.”

Reduced Development Complexity and Processing Costs

In developing the previous Web-based version of IDD, Dell spent a great deal of time and effort trying to get a Web-based solution to perform like a desktop application, resulting in more than 550,000 lines of JavaScript and more than 5 million total lines of code. Despite a significant investment in development resources, the solution could never deliver a rich enough user experience nor all of the features that Dell wanted to provide: the ability to handle multiple customers at the same time and easily switch between them, the asynchronous retrieving and updating of data, drag-and-drop capabilities, undo and redo commands, and the ability for users to customize the IDD workspace.

IDD already is significantly exceeding ROI expectations, and we’ve barely begun to explore what’s possible.  Gregg Hansen Senior Manager, Application Development, Sales and Marketing Systems, Dell

IDD, through its extensive use of Web services, also reduces development complexity for Dell by loosely coupling the smart client with the distributed systems that it accesses. IDD depends on the capabilities of dozens of back-end systems, each of which has its own software development team, priorities, and timelines. With integration of the smart client and those back-end systems through Web services, each of those systems can evolve more independently—in a way that isolates the smart client from the internal workings of those systems and any changes that are made at that level.

In addition, IDD helps reduce processing time and costs by shifting a big part of that burden from a cluster of centralized Web servers to the 8,000 user desktops that now run the application. Even though the IDD smart client provides several new features and capabilities, Dell did not need to increase the number of Web servers required to support its sales force.

Return on Investment and Future Directions

Like all business decisions at Dell, the original business case for development of IDD was driven by return on investment (ROI), for which Dell initially projected a 4 to 8 times return. Actual figures are tracking ahead of that expectation, at a 9 times return. “ROI is how we run and prioritize our business—it’s a part of our daily lives,” says Hansen. “IDD already is significantly exceeding ROI expectations, and we’ve barely begun to explore what’s possible.”

Developers already are working on an enhanced version of IDD, which will include powerful new features: a hierarchical view that will help Dell sales representatives better understand the organizational structure of its business customers, the ability to swap out a system’s base chassis midway through the configuration process, the capability to configure two systems side by side, and the ability to drive real-time promotional offers based on a customer’s historical data. But to Hansen, all those features are but a small glimpse into what’s now possible.

“With the power and flexibility of a smart client, our ability to change the way we do business and interact with customers in new ways is vastly improved,” he says. “For example, we could use the data from a credit check to drive product recommendations. Although those two functions exist today, they run on entirely different systems—one hosted internally and the other a service that is provided by a third party. With the IDD smart client, we can seamlessly combine the capabilities of those systems in ways that just weren’t possible in the past.”

In addition to rolling out IDD to the rest of its sales force, Dell plans to extend the solution to all other customer-facing disciplines, including both customer care and technical support. As the company works toward that goal, its ability to interact with customers in new and innovative ways will no longer be limited by the traditional technology barriers that have separated its information systems in the past. Instead, it will depend on the company’s creativity in finding new ways to combine and use that data—a challenge that Hansen is eager to face.

“In a few years,” says Hansen, “I can envision an environment where no employee at Dell needs to ask a customer ‘what are you running?’ Instead, I see an enterprise where everyone can better know the customer and use that information to more efficiently meet his or her needs. Imagine a scenario where a customer calls into Dell technical support to say that a newly installed application is running sluggishly. Instead of having to ask the customer how his or her system is configured, the support representative is provided with that information by IDD and can immediately see that the system doesn’t have enough memory. Furthermore, the technical support representative can sell the customer a memory upgrade on the spot, without having to transfer the caller to a sales representative. In addition to delivering a better customer experience, that one capability could fund our entire support infrastructure, turning what has always been a cost center into a new profit center. The beauty of IDD is that capabilities like that are not only possible, but should be relatively easy to achieve. The possibilities really are endless.”

For More Information

For more information about Symbyo products and services, call the Symbyo Sales Information Center at 877.4.796296 .

This case study is for informational purposes only. Symbyo  MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Top of page