18/05/2004

Travelex, the world's largest foreign exchange specialist, is known to many from its exclusive broadcast and online sponsorship of the last year's Rugby World Cup on ITV.

One of the most important elements of Travelex's business is its Customer Communication Centre, winner of the European Call Centre of the Year award two years in a row.

Naturally, sustaining success of this kind depends on deploying the right kind of technology. "We have an in-house developed system, which is primarily used to capture orders from consumers and financial institutions," says Peter French, Travelex's Head of Procurement and IT Financial and Asset Management. "These orders can be for a number of products including foreign currency, travellers cheques and pre-paid cards."

Crucial to the success of this system is the facility with which it can capture details of all callers. Accuracy at the point of entry is a key requirement, necessitating the best available address capture and management software.

Mr. French says "Recently, our arrangement with an existing address management software vendor was due for renewal. I decided to arrange a meeting with another vendor, QAS Systems, to discuss their products, from both a functional and financial perspective. It soon became apparent that the QAS software was a perfect match for our requirements."

The product that Travelex opted for was QuickAddress Names, which builds on the address capture and verification functionality of QAS' core QuickAddress Pro solution by adding a full name, including a salutation, to any specified residential address.

French recalls "When we looked at introducing the QAS software, we were acutely aware that deployment was due to take place during a very busy period of time for our call centre, and as such were understandably quite nervous. QAS assured us that the integration of their software with our in-house developed system would be very straightforward, and said they were extremely confident that we could meet these tight timescales. We therefore set QAS and our internal project team an extremely tight timescale of 10 days to deploy this software. This period included integration with existing software, system and user acceptance testing."

Travelex's faith was rewarded. "True to their word, QAS were available throughout the deployment and we managed to complete in nine days," says French.

French says that the response from internal users to the new enhanced system has been very positive: "We are now able to drill further for address information, including down to flat numbers. This has obviously had a positive impact on our external customers in that we are able to retrieve their address details in a more timely fashion, providing a positive customer experience. We have also received positive feedback from our IT teams, who tell us that the software updates are very easy to perform."

As Travelex looks to maintain its leading market position, it can be reassured that accuracy of customer information will not be a problem.