*Company Name:*Communications Data Services, a division of Hearst Corporation. (http://www.cdsfulfillment.com/)
*Primary industry:*Publishing Services
*Size of Company:*3,000 Employees
*Corporate Headquarters:*Des Moines, IA
CDS, which provides fulfillment and data management services to publishers including Conde Nast, Meredith, Rodale, Reader's Digest and National Geographic Books, has used BizWiki since December 2005. The company, which operates 240 customer care sites for its different clients, has roughly 25 million subscriber names in its databases.
The company's corporate offices are located in Des Moines, Iowa, with branch-site locations in: Boone, Harlan, Red Oak, Tipton and Wilton, Iowa; Bethlehem, Pa., and Prescott, Ariz. Additionally, CDS maintains an office in New York City; owns Tower Publishing Services, Ltd., a United Kingdom and Australian fulfillment company; and owns INDAS Limited, a Canadian subscription and product fulfillment company located in Markham, Ontario, and Montreal, Quebec.
CDS is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Hearst Corporation and employs 3,000 people worldwide.
The Hearst Corporation is one of the nation's largest diversified communications companies, with interests in: magazines; newspapers; books and business publishing; television and radio stations; newspaper comics and features syndication; cable television networks; television production and syndication; and new media activities.
As a leader in the magazine fulfillment industry with almost 3000 employees in offices across the United States, CDS was faced with a number of content management and knowledge sharing challenges. The first challenge was improving methods for creating and sharing web-based information. The current technologies employ a traditional repository model for finding, sharing and delivering information, which is inefficient and doesn’t handle just in time information needs.
CDS was looking for a solution to help its employees share relevant information in a more efficient manner. CDS was particularly interested in improving the distribution of internal information. In addition, CDS was interested in finding methods to “front end” access to data living in disparate databases and information silos, such as Lotus Notes.
“Our business is really highly information-driven,” said Tim Plimmer, CDS’ Senior Vice President of Operations. With operating centers in locations spanning Bethlehem, Pa., to Prescott, Ariz., as well as six Iowa centers, “we were always looking for better ways to populate pertinent information about clients and services we perform and the nuances of their businesses and be able to distribute that across multiple enterprises,” he said.
"Most operators know the policies, but the more intricate ones, or ones that just came up - like if editorial content is causing a stir - the team gets a message that there's specific content for this. 'Tell the reader this' or 'Send it to editorial,'" says Plimmer. "We're trying to take information that's in many people's minds or may be in manuals and create a knowledge information wiki repository that is dynamic and ever changing to meet our business needs."
Plimmer determined that delivering information to employees via an Enterprise Wiki would be a huge improvement over the existing data repository methods. "It's very easy to create, search for, edit and read wiki pages," he noted. In the evaluation process ease of administration was identified as another essential requirement. The solution chosen had to be easy to administer across the entire enterprise.
Plimmer chose CustomerVision BizWiki to handle the firm's knowledge sharing needs. The deployment began with the firm's Customer Service, TrainingMarketing departments andquicklyto the rest of the company. The installation and implementation was straightforward and easy, with core functionality working immediately and users were able to learn the product without training. According to Plimmer, "CustomerVision's support team was very knowledgeable and professional. They responded immediately when we had questions and resolved all our issues."
With CustomerVision’s assistance, Communications Data Services Inc. in Des Moines implemented an internal wiki application in less than 30 days, which it calls “Ask CDS,” in December. The world’s largest magazine subscription fulfillment company, CDS services approximately 335 magazine titles and 25 direct-marketing companies.
BizWiki is available to 1,800 employees in CDS operations - call centers, mail processing, image scanning, e-mail customer service - at its 10 U.S. sites as well as those in Canada, England and Australia. They use BizWiki to inform their employees of the different protocols each publisher has for handling subscriber inquiries.
·CDS feels they have experienced call time reduction and expects to measure this in the upcoming 6 months.Current statisticsmillion emails per year and 9.2M phone calls, so if we dropped 25% average contact time by 30 seconds,a $1/contact savings = $3.05M.
·Creating new articles from emails, of the 566 pages over 100 have been created from "Ask the Expert", which reduces the future contact exponentially, assuming each new article save only 2 emails and answer the time and cost savings would be approximately, $3,000 over a 3 month period.
·Reduction in time spent during client marketing and sales contacts due to quick search and availability of data and information.
CDS's initial evaluation began with a variety of potential knowledge sharing solutions. After evaluating several potential solutions Plimmer realized CustomerVision had a number of advantages over competing solutions. CustomerVision BizWiki is a hosted solution so it requires no desktop deployment, because of its ease of use it requires no training, and new content is generated without changing employees daily jobs. "We have offices nationwide and almost 3000 potential users. Complex products which require a manual install are becoming harder to justify as an enterprise solution due to the cost of the installation and trainingsupport," he noted. With CustomerVision CDS came across a hosted solution that didn't require extensive training or any installation requirements.
CustomerVision it is easy for administrators to create and manage groups and access levels from a centralized location. The CustomerVision administrator assigns users to groups and then can assign specific pages to these groups. This results in these groups receiving just the information they need to see. CustomerVision’s centralized user group/level assignment functionality gives CDS the ability to assign relevant sections to unique business units within the firm (e.g. Marketing Department, Customer Service, Training, etc.) with no time required from its IT staff.
The system is easy to use and makes information more readily available than it was previously with the Lotus Notes databases the company uses, Plimmer says. "Employees knew information was somewhere but now they can get to it by doing a Search to get a response in a matter of seconds, or the Ask the Expert function in BizWiki can help when an employee can't find the answer to a question theynot know who the expert is for a particular system but within minutes a question is routed through CustomerVision to a CDS knowledge expert who answers the question." Plimmer says. "It wouldn't be something you can just look on the software vendor's site to see how it's run" because the company writes most of its own systems.
After using it internally for several months among a few hundred of its operational employees, “we’re impressed with the software,” Plimmer said. “It’s doing what they said it would do and it’s filling a need we have for distribution and collaboration of information that’s critical to operating our business.”
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_Case study authored by Brian Keairns, Vice president of Product Management at CustomerVision, and Tim Plimmer, Executive Vice President at CDS.
Case study submitted by CustomerVision, a wiki vendor
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Page Last Updated: Jul 25 11:46am by dave burke