Extra Space Storage Inc. wanted to take back its call center from an outsourcing company to give customers a more personal and more reliable experience when choosing self-storage space in one of its 685 facilities. It also wanted to integrate a lot more applications with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The result: a call center built on cloud computing.
For Extra Space Storage, the call center solution needed to be flexible -- not just for the 50 call center agents but also for the rest of the 2,500 employees, who needed reliable remote access to several systems: a point-of-sale (POS) application, a new Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM application and a new help desk issue tracking system. Most employees are in the field at the facilities, where customers rent space for furniture and other items.
The self-storage space provider also needed to quickly bring more than a dozen acquired facilities into the call center fold, and integrate the various facilities management systems -- acquisition, construction and operations -- behind one interface.
The trick was turning around a pretty large-scale project quickly, with minimal additions to the IT headcount. The company also didn't want to build out its network infrastructure or buy additional hardware or software; its contract was up to renew its help desk application licenses, for example.
For Bill Hoban, CIO of Salt Lake City-based Extra Space Storage, the answer was simple: build a call center in the cloud.
The company already had a POS application running off-site, in a data center run by self-storage management services provider Centershift Inc. 'The step to cloud computing wasn't a hard step,' Hoban said. 'We wouldn't have to build out our infrastructure, and we were already comfortable running software systems on hardware and a network that didn't belong to us for the last eight years.'
Hoban's team decided on Salesforce.com Inc. for its SaaS CRM application and inContact Inc.'s SaaS-based call center suite to handle the telephony piece. The inContact software and switch pass information to the Salesforce.com CRM application. The integration between the POS, CRM and telephony applications was done using Cast Iron Cloud, an integration service that has preconfigured templates for integrating common SaaS business applications and processes.
'With Cast Iron we migrated 6 million records from our POS system to Salesforce.com, with [Cast Iron's] professional services constructing the code,' Hoban said. 'We saved in the range of $97,000 because they did it so quickly and we didn't have to hire or bring in a third-party consultant for the coding.'
The company saved another $75,000 by building its internal help desk ticketing system into Salesforce.com, versus renewing a contract with its existing help desk provider.
Setting the stage for cloud computing
The initial rollout of the integrated cloud suite, which included a new application to track hundreds of bank loans on its facilities, was completed in three months.