BC Tel Improves Customer Service with the Help of TeleUSE

When Canada's telephone industry was deregulated in 1992, BC Tel, the country's second largest telecommunications company with more than one million customers and two million lines, was faced with competition for the first time in its 100-year history. Their goal: retain 100% share of the local market and 90% share of the long distance market. One effective way to do this was to improve how customers were handled when they called for information or service.

BC Tel Systems solutions, a division of the Vancouver-based company, was charged with updating the customer contact system used by about 500 service representatives. Systems Solutions provides, through systems development and integration, leading-edge business solutions for the BC TELECOM group of companies and a wide range of other customers. Historically, the company's applications have been mainframe-based on traditional IBM hardware, using IMS, COBOL, and character-based display mechanisms.

The goal was to move to an open systems platform with a graphical user interface. This would add value by giving the service representatives the ability to see more information at once. In addition, new windowing functionality would allow them to do their jobs more quickly.

The development team chose to modernize this environment by moving to a Unix-based cooperative system integrated with the legacy system but offering a much more powerful graphical user interface using X11 Motif technology. But the team did not want to code the complex Motif code by hand, according to Bruce Campbell, project manager for the development effort.

"There were 25 GUI builder tools on the market at that time, because it was cheap for companies to get into the GUI market. The two things we asked were: Who is showing leadership? and Who is going to be there in the long run?"

"Many companies had sexy products, but with a narrow scope. They did certain things very well but neglected large parts of Motif. We felt that we needed a full-function product. Many companies told us that their full-function version was just around the corner, yet we needed it right away—we could not afford to wait. That meant there were only a few vendors who could meet our minimum standards, and based on their product maturity and how they treated us when we did our evaluation, we chose TeleUSE. We took the plunge, purchased four development licenses and got to work."

"Like everyone else who is developing a GUI, we needed to express logic in our system. The TeleUSE D language, an interrupt-driven scripting language, is very helpful for doing that. If we had not gone that route, we would have had to write callbacks in C, and while it may be somewhat more standard, it certainly would not have been so easy."

"Another feature of TeleUSE that we like was the ability to build common templates. This way, we have been able to customize the general Motif widgets to suit our own needs, and we have greatly reduced that time to build new screens. And, by using these templates, making maintenance changes to the applications is a lot easier."

In the old system, a BC Tel service representative would have to navigate through a minimum of four screens simply to verify that the customer call was legitimate and to gather enough information to answer the customer's requests. Often it took even more screens. Now, with the new GUI interface running on an X terminal, all this information is organized on one screen using scrollable display fields. In addition, they are able to display huge procedure manuals on-line by using hypertext technology. Also, having more than one window open at once gives each user the ability to access several sources of information at once. All of this adds up to happier, more effective users.

BC Tel Systems Solutions has successfully completed and deployed the first phase of the new system and is well into the next phase.

"The project has not been without its challenges," Campbell says, "but on the whole it has gone very well. Given that the whole industry was new and growing when we started, things have worked out pretty darn well. As for TeleUSE, it has almost become part of the mainstream for our developers and judging from the marketplace, we made the right choice—TeleUSE is still showing industry leadership in the GUI builder market."