Smollan Holdings, South Africa’s leading provider of outsourced services to multiple channels, primarily in the fast moving consumer goods industry, has significantly improved its IT technical support team, enabled its acceptance by the business, users and customers, and increased response times to client enquiries and requests through the implementation of the locally developed software solution Radical, developed and distributed by solutions provider DVT.
Radical was introduced into Smollan’s IT helpdesk two years ago, and later extended into its customer call centre environment. It is used to manage incoming calls, prioritise and assign the appropriate resources, escalate calls as and when necessary, document calls and track call progress against outstanding work. 

“We discovered Radical while investigating a helpdesk solution for our IT technical support team,” says Colleen Rose, IT director at Smollan Holdings. “Once we had implemented it we discovered that it had a much wider application in our customer contact centre, where it provides the extreme flexibility and functionality we require in that environment. We need to be able to respond quickly to client requirements, especially because we market ourselves as outsourced service providers, and Radical allows us to do so with amazingly short turn around times and great reliability.” 

Currently running on Windows and SQL 2000 servers, Radical provides Smollan with business intelligence functionality in its helpdesk and call centre environment, and its business rule processor ensures that the company strictly adheres to the necessary business practices by setting up e-mail and data change notifications. 

It provides a complete form and data editor that allows Smollan to change the look, feel and data structure to suit its business demands. Using simple form design, the base forms allow users to capture and report on information; while the advanced functionality of the Advanced Form Logic allows the system administrators to design their own forms and determine how the data is captured in the form and what happens to the data after the capture. 

“Built-in security in Radical protects Smollan’s data through easy-to-configure security profiles that can be set using the software’s Package Editor,” says Paula Hocking, business development manager of Radical at DVT. “Smollan can set limits of what level of users have access to information, and what information they may access, so preventing crucial business intelligence from falling into the wrong hands.” 

Licensed for 30 users against a single database, Radical has enabled Smollan to take on a number of new clients in its call centre, and its technical support staff are now better able to provide clients with software that exactly meets their needs. 

Prior to implementing Radical, Smollan had no IT helpdesk product and the call centre was relying on software written internally. As a result, the company was suffering from slow project turnaround times and a significant and unjustifiable consumption of resources. 

“The product has proved that it indeed has greater applicability in our wider business, more than we had originally expected,” Rose says. “The potential for applying it into other aspects of our business was one of three drivers that resulted in its introduction into our business. The second was the fact that it is a local product and therefore provided us with access to local support. However, as an independent company we quickly moved away from external support to managing and maintaining the product by ourselves, with DVT only assisting when we are unable to find a solution. A third driver was its flexibility to adapt to our exact needs, which it has done successfully.”