Integration of 30 KPN contact centres into a new subsidiary company

January 1999 to February 2000

Until the end of the nineties KPN had by far the largest in-house contact centre organisation in the Netherlands, with more than 4500 employees and over 130 million calls per year.

However, different business entities within KPN all had own independent policies regarding customer contact. As a result, the contact centre organisation was fragmented and expensive, with about 40 different customer contact channels, handled by over 30 often differently organised call centres set up in more than 50 locations in the country.

To reduce costs and to be able to introduce new services and call centre media, KPN started a programme in 1999 to combine all contact centre activities into one new subsidiary company with its own call centre labour agreement: KPN Callcenters.

My initial responsibility was to conduct the preliminary feasibility study which led to the final Board decision to actually start the programme. However, my most important project was to design the implementation plan and subsequently to project manage the actual transition of the call centres from their existing environments to the newly set-up company.

The vast and complex organisational changes were to take place without disrupting the existing customer processes, and with minimal impact on the contact centres and on the rest of KPN. This meant that existing contact centres needed to be transferred unchanged to their new organisational setting. For this purpose I developed a tailor made solution, whereby the call centres were “cut” out of their existing environments on the basis of process activities.

The migration on January 1st 2000 went smoothly. Not a single problem occurred with regard to the operational customer processes, and employees simply continued their daily work. Thus the project complied with KPN’s wishes and it created a starting point enabling KPN to carry through the required adjustments and planned cost reductions.