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Customer Voice Portal (CVP) to replace outdated legacy IVR systems.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.
