Background
Kensington produced its first aluminum windows in a small factory in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Anticipating an industry demand for new, modern, energy efficient, and maintenance free materials, the company shifted its focus to vinyl later in the decade. The 1980's brought about a growing acceptance of vinyl building materials in many residential areas of the country and Kensington continued to develop revolutionary products to meet the demand. Through growth, expansion, and reinvestment in new technologies, today Kensington is one of the premiere window manufactures in the country. In fact, combined with its sister companies, Kensington is one of the top ten vinyl window producers in the U.S. and one of the top ten producers of vinyl building materials.

Challenge
Like any major building supply manufacturer, Kensington faces the challenges of a market that is experiencing sharp price competition along with immediate access issues related to prospective customers. With locations of dealers located throughout the country, it is paramount that Kensington maintains accessibility to their current as well as prospective customers.
 
Previous to Kensington's relationship with Worldwide Interactive Services, Inc. in 2001, Jancor contracted with a call center that services many high profile companies such as Sony and Sharp. The call center was to receive incoming calls and relay information to customers and dealers about the closest location for the dealer in their area. The call center would, in turn, retrieve contact information about the customer. Dealers then received information on these customers in order to appropriately follow up.
 
"The inquiring customer would call in and the call center would tell them the closest dealer in their area. While the customer was on the line, the operator would take their name, address and phone number. At the end of the week the call center would mail out marketing collateral to the inquiring customer and give contact information to dealer for the lead," said Craig Sherritt, Director of Marketing for Kensington. "This promoted a huge problem for us. Often times these opportunities would fizzle out because of false contact information and extended time between follow up," Sherritt remarked.
 
The most immediate need was the customer who wanted to find the closest dealership. Operators at the call center compiled incomplete or false data for the dealers, and when the dealers finally got back with the inquiring customers, often times it was too late. Kensington needed to find an alternative method.

Solution
Kensington selected Worldwide Interactive Services, Inc. locator service as the hosted application and interface for its dealer locator. Through our application, Kensington customers and rospective customers call a toll free number and are immediately recognized through ANI or zip code. Based on the location of the inquiring customer's location, an instant message is played of the closest dealer location. Those who request to be connected to that dealer are routed to that dealer immediately. Sherritt recognized the that there must be a better way of providing these services. He wanted to be able to handle large call volumes without increasing staff, while providing a fast and effective way to respond to customer inquiries and getting the customer in touch with the dealer quicker. He also wanted this system deployed as quickly as possible without incurring the substantial upfront costs and risks associated with buying his own equipment and developing his own application.

Initially, Sherritt was attracted to Worldwide Interactive Services, Inc.'s model since it allowed him to use DTMF hosted voice self-service on a pay-per-call-taken basis. Worldwide Interactive Services, Inc.'s track record of deploying applications in a matter of a few weeks without requiring large upfront purchase costs, or IT infrastructure changes, made it a unique contender. As Sherritt delved deeper, he realized that this would not only provide his inquiring customers with location information, but also get them in touch immediately with their dealers.

Worldwide Interactive Services, Inc.'s voice applications were able to:

1. Integrate with Kensington 's existing database systems.
2. Use ANI or zip code to instantly identify and validate the caller's location.
3. Integrate with their existing database and provide them with the closest dealer location based on the caller's location.
4. Connect that caller with the appropriate dealer by placing an outbound call.
5. Manage the call flow according to specific yet customizable criteria set by Kensington.
6. Integrate with existing major telecomm infrastructures such as those provided by Bellsouth and Sprint.
7. Enable Kensington to collect data and call data throughout the month for administrative and marketing purposes.

Results
Increased Support: By providing an HTML interface accessible on the web, Kensington is permitted to modify their database of dealers. "It was always a nightmare to add or remove dealers from our database with the call center. After numerous emails of lists back and forth between Kensington and the call center often times the databases were update three weeks following the initial request. "Often times our dealer directory was out of date before it was updated.

Increased Customer Satisfaction: Reduced hold times and a prompt response to inquiries improved customer satisfaction at Kensington. The dealers are much happier due to the ability for inquiring customers to be connected instantaneously.

Increased Revenue: Because of the ability to handle increased call volumes, plus the improved productivity of services due to automated interactive voice response, Sherritt estimates that Kensington has been able to save 40% of hard dollars plus an increase in sales.

Looking to expand voice self-service "The dealer locator service hosted Worldwide's application has been terrific," Sherritt said. Since the deployment of its original application, Kensington has been extremely pleased with its services." It has recently contracted two more of its manufacturing divisions for voice and internet solutions with Worldwide.