Entirely owned by its members, and winner of the 2003 International Online/Mail Order Merchant of the year (for the eighth time in the last nine years), The Wine Society was founded over a century ago with the objective of providing its member with a wide range of good quality, value for money wines backed up by excellent service. It currently offers over 1,500 wines across a broad price range.

Based in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, The Wine Society maintains a call centre, employing 45 member services operators and support specialists, a Showroom for visitors to browse and select wines, and a range of tasting events across the UK. Orders are placed by phone, fax, post, or via an integrated website, and many deliveries are made by The Wine Society's own van fleet.

Until TokOpen, the filing of orders and other paper communications and enquiries at The Wine Society was entirely manual. Orders and documents processed and ready for filing, such as pre-printed format order forms mixed with letters in various formats and sizes and printed emails, would be delivered for sorting and filing. Backlogs could occur at peak times, just when the business is under greatest pressure - for example Christmas when order volumes are typically four times greater than normal levels, and often more complex.

Retrieval of folders, for responding to enquiries or audit management purposes, required member services co-ordinators to collect the reference files in batches, for efficiency, since they were located two floors away, and this tended to rule out an instant response to certain types of follow-up or order-related enquiry.

Now, the order filing (indexing) process is automated from the point of scanning and only exceptions have to be managed and indexed manually. Letters and handwritten documents coming in from our members, which vary in size, background colour and content and do not contain any recognition factors, are indexed manually to the target folder.

Member Services operators can now view our members' document images via their desktop, and there is also a dynamic hot-key link between our Maginus Customer Log and TokOpen, which will display the member's TokOpen folder, giving instant access to the relevant file. "Our operators can call up details straight away in response to an enquiry, meaning far fewer 'callbacks' and enabling our operators to focus on service to members.

TokOpen will also address the need to archive documents, although as a starting point we decided to concentrate on using TokOpen for new documents, rather than scan and index millions of historical documents which may never need to be retrieved. The paper folders, held in a secure area, have been mothballed and their contents will only be reactivated (scanned into TokOpen) if necessary.

The overall result of using TokOpen is a significant improvement in the quality of our records and service in this area, and the reduction in backlogs and file searching helps us to meet and maintain high service targets. Time taken to manually sort and file paper documents has been cut dramatically, and the 30 hours per month previously spent on manually thinning down over-sized files is no longer necessary. Around the business, printing of outgoing correspondence for filing has been superseded by the ability to drag and drop documents such as letters and emails electronically into members' folders, eliminating the need for printing and double handling. We also estimate a saving of around 13 hours a month on callback times. It is difficult to quantify precisely in terms of cost and time the savings, but we are confident that these have manifested themselves in improved availability of information, greater confidence in the quality of data, and therefore improved reaction and service time.

© Copyright 2004 Tokairo