As part of its ongoing pursuit of high performance, SFR launched a major initiative to simplify its technology assets and capabilities across the enterprise. At the core of this initiative was an effort to rationalize the company’s technology providers and streamline IT into blocks of applications that served specific business functions and that would share key components.
While the company anticipated these moves would have a profound effect on its efficiency and effectiveness, it was equally important they help reduce costs. The company also planned to drive additional cost savings from the switch to open source applications, which would cut its licensing and maintenance costs—worth hundreds of thousands of euros each year—as well as enable SFR to develop application upgrades and improvements more cost-effectively.
One of the most important of these applications supported SFR’s customer phone-based self-care processes, which were critical not just to customer service but also to the company’s ability to differentiate itself in the marketplace profitably. The company wanted to replace this interactive voice response (IVR) application, which was due for an update, with a new solution built using open source and voice-XML (VXML) technologies.