Quick Stats
Employees: 400+ Full-time Employees (300+ Collectors)
Headquarters: Williamsville, NY (USA)
Branch Offices: Rochester, NY, Tampa, FL & Fort Erie, Ontario
Customer Info
Mercantile Adjustment Bureau, LLC (Mercantile) was founded in 1934 as a collection agency servicing Western New York healthcare providers. While remaining loyal to the healthcare business that gave them their start, Mercantile has also significantly diversified their client base.
An example of this diversification was their expansion into a new business vertical when they won the business of Direct Brands, Inc., a distributor of books, movies and music, and home of 24 of the most well know book clubs in the country. For this expansion, Mercantile took a step away from collections to act as Direct Brands' customer service contact center. This represented a significant departure from their normal line of business and surfaced a need for a more comprehensive solution to manage their contact center
Challenge
The project required advanced real-time data management, an agent interface to work with a commercial web-based CRM, and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to support account look up, order taking, payment processing, and canceling orders, and ACD functionality for call routing.
Mercantile needed the ability to manage multiple data feeds from current CUBS, SAP and Magento systems, and be able to provide data results from consumer interactions while communicating with the client’s IVR system. They also needed to manage all calls stemming from the Direct Brands account and effectively distribute them to the Direct Brands’ existing call centers in order to act as the main Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system for Mercantile’s in-house representatives.
How we took on the challenge
Obviously, data management was the key component of this project. With data feeds for customer, promotional and product information streaming from the Direct Brands SAP system and changing daily, DialConnection designed and built a database for Direct Brands to receive and collect data according to provided specifications.
- All processes were built to collect and return client data via a SAP data stream and have the results collected during consumer calls managed by the DialConnection IVR
- DialConnection provided the agent interface Mercantile representatives used to manage inbound consumer calls
- Dynamic call routing was used to identify consumer club members and verify the status of the specific club in regards to the conversion
Results
Within two weeks of receiving the finalized version of the IVR specification document, DialConnection had a running version of the IVR ready for Mercantile and Direct Brands to begin testing. Within four weeks, the final IVR was production ready. The end result: 100% of the required functionality was realized.
The DialConnection Contact Center allowed Mercantile to easily move into the customer service center arena and win a significant piece of business.
I have to admit that we came away more than impressed by Mercantile and DialConnection. Lauren Miller, Vice President, Payment Solutions, Direct Brands, Inc.