During the 9 months prior to August 2008 a total of 60.5 hours were spent supporting the TTS. During the following 8 months this was reduced to 26 hours. On average this was a reduction of 43% from 7 to 3 hours per month.

The time taken to provide a customer with a Trading Account ready for testing when they’ve not used the online payment system before has also improved significantly. For Worldpay this would take up to 3 weeks (typically around 2 weeks) – Warwick Retail would have to order a new merchant code, then use this merchant code to arrange a new Worldpay account. This was a lot of effort for Warwick Retail to arrange these accounts with the amount of paper work involved.

After moving to eSolutions this process has been reduce to approx 5 minutes, i.e. the time taken to actually fill out the new Trading Account administration screens. Once this is done the customer can start testing immediately. This is not only quicker for the customer but has significantly reduced the amount of work for Warwick Retail in creating these accounts.

This improvement was achieved by sharing a single Merchant account for a majority of the University online payment income so Warwick Retail only needed to arrange the merchant code and a eSolutions account once. We were only able to do this after we had shown the finance team that the data on the TTS would be 100% accurate and they could rely on this to show them how to split income on a single merchant account into multiple profit centres.

This has significantly reduced and simplified the administration of online payments while improving the overall service to the user.

The improved admin interface has provided sufficient functionality to customers for us to justify a formal training session with the IT Services training team. This will help reduce the amount of support that is required from us (Warwick Retail mainly) to support new users of the system and will help departments (like accommodation) who have a high turnover of staff that constantly need re-training.