The power to professionally manage all customer communications – regardless of how your customers prefer to communicate.

Challenge

HomeCenter.com is quickly becoming the easiest source for consumers and contractors to find all the home-improvement products they need. The company stocks an enormous inventory and represents virtually every manufacture. Shoppers can get information and place orders over the telephone, by using e-mail or on a web site. The company even helps consumers locate a nearby contractor to do the installation.

With a steadily-growing customer base, Customer Service Supervisor Jessi Lowi said HomeCenter.com needed more control of its customer communication process. "The company started out with just a regular phone system with nine separate lines. Incoming customer calls rang on all phones until someone picked one up," she said.

The company needed a way to better manage its sales and service operation, which meant having the ability to track call volume, measure the quality of the agent’s performance, and monitor and proactively improve the customers’ experience. HomeCenter.com enlisted NacTel to install a unified call center solution.

Solution

NacTel installed the EpicServer communications software, a turnkey solution that enables HomeCenter.com to blend incoming voice calls, data screen pops to identify callers, e-mail, web-chat, voice mail, abandoned callback and integrated voice response (IVR) in one unified contact center. When contacting HomeCenter.com, some customers prefer the phone, some like e-mail and others choose text-chat on the Internet. The new contact center gives each agent, and the entire organization, the ability to serve customers as they prefer, with more precision and with a noticeable professional edge.

Through the skills-based routing feature, incoming calls are not just passed on to the next available agent. The system is programmed to assess callers’ needs, then determine which agent has the appropriate knowledge and skills to provide the best service. For example, a customer might be asked to enter "1" if interested in a placing special order, "2" if technical assistance is required, or "3"if ready to make a purchase, then be transferred right to the best-suited agent.

Real-time monitoring is possible on an ordinary desktop PC. Like having a dash board with all the essential gauges and controls, Jessi supervises how agents are performing and how customers are being serviced. For example, she watches how many agents have calls in progress, how many calls remain on hold and for how long, and which agents are idle. She’s also able to monitor how long agents spend talking with customers, and can even keep track when agents take a break.

Benefits

"I really feel we’re in complete control now," Jessi said. What she finds particularly helpful are the Wrap-Up Codes that categorize calls. HomeCenter.com tracks how many calls each agent handles for returns, inquires about shipping tracking numbers and what types of products are most-often requested. "We saw that a third of our incoming calls were for customers wanting to know the tracking numbers of their shipments," she explained, "so we added a feature on the web site that lets them get this information on their own. It really cut the amount of time our agents spent dealing with these questions, and our customers are happier because they can get this information anytime they want."

Other Wrap-Up codes tell HomeCenter.com how customers found out about them (and they use this information to better target their marketing efforts), and how many people inquire if certain items are in stock.

Another way HomeCenter.com better manages its business is with the wide variety of reports available, and almost any report needed can be easily generated. Jessi said she routinely monitors productivity by looking at the number of calls each agent handles, average talk time and how many abandoned calls occur each day and how long each caller was on hold before hanging up. And with Call-ID, "we can give a courtesy call to follow up," Jessi said.

"I still joke with our agents," Jessi chuckles. "Our old handbook instructs agents to make sure to answer the phone if it’s ringing. That’s totally obsolete now. The system will never forward a call to an agent who is on the phone. That means no more ringing telephones!"

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