• Integrated Contact Solutions

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Streamlining the Customer Experience with Integrated Contact Solutions

Company Overview:

Generating over $30 billion in annual revenue, this national department store chain serves 43 million households. Their active customer base represents approximately 60% of all U.S. households. The company operates over 870 stores.

Purpose:

Transform the customer experience when calling any one of the 870 stores. Free up store personnel to focus on on-floor sales and service interactions with customers and on inventory management. Integrate operations at five distinct contact centers staffed by some 2,500 customer service representatives.

Business Objectives:

• Implement a strategy with immediate and verifiable positive business impact.
• Reduce telecommunications costs by eliminating misrouted inbound calls, and reducing call transfers.
• Put an end to unanswered calls routed to sales floor, where high call volume and sales associate unavailability were leading to customer neglect.
• Drive increased sales volume through an enhanced customer experience for callers reaching either the call center or the store.

The Solution:

• Implement 'Enterprise Call Pathing' capability where the call is "intercepted" and re-routed to a centralized Enterprise IVR to determine the customer's intent, and then fulfilled in self-service, or routed to the best person who can help them (Store, new shared services Call Center or 3rd Party service provider)
• Use new enterprise speech-enabled application using Cisco Customer Voice Portal (CVP) to replace outdated legacy IVR systems. The advanced voice recognition solution determines the nature of the call, directs the call, and monitors and reports on the customer experience and calling patterns.
• CVP enables centralized 'ingress' for calls, avoids extra hardware at remote sites, and allows for fast and easy changes to the IVR self-service applications as needed.
• Use integrated enterprise call routing with Cisco Intelligent Contact Manager (ICM) for intelligent rules-based routing of calls to contact centers or to stores based on requirements from the IVR application and known data about the caller.
• Use integrated CTI 'Screen Pop' for calls routed to the call center.

The Process:

• Begin the planning and requirements step to review root causes of customer interaction shortfalls, and assess technological, personnel and process needs to resolve communications challenges.
• Implement the design step to integrate retailer's data center, contact center and retail stores with a single enterprise solution. Architecture design for inbound customer inquiries that encompasses the entire end-to-end call flow, and creates a means for seamless call transfer between disparate customer service sites.
• Determine best opportunities for automating simple transactions and implement self-service processes for responding to customers faster and with greater convenience.
• Phased rollout of new capabilities across 870 stores.
• Deploy contact center-managed services and advanced monitoring.

Results:

• Robust speech recognition applications have improved the customer interaction experience. The large vocabulary enabled via speech recognition has enabled much better recognition and routing of customer requests.
• Misrouted calls to the wrong department have been eradicated.
• Contact center agents are now spending more time with consumers with a genuine buying interest in large ticket items, like electronics, appliances and furniture.