Anne Holmes, Account Director for ScS at SVL, shares an insight into the contact centre services they offer and their recent furniture case study.
SVL is the longest running partner of the Contact Centre industry in the UK and currently works with a range of retailers directly by supporting their in-house Contact Centre, and also many more who use “outsourced” Contact Centres across the UK and Ireland.
For retailers, SVL provides a wide range of services directly related to improving their Customer Experience, by advising on and supplying software to record, monitor and analyse the quality of inbound and outbound contacts, to store and search interactions across all communication “channels” which now includes voice, email, webchat, social media and video.
“The furniture retail market, like all others, has developed it’s omni-channel services for their clients and needs to be able to quickly and safely monitor, analyse and store these interactions.”
“We help retail contact centres improve their employee’s working experience through powerful Workforce Management software, which allows them to plan resource effectively and engage their employees,” Anne Holmes, Account Director at SVL said.
When it comes to implementing their services into the furniture retail industry, SVL has recently forged a partnership with national sofa and carpets retailer ScS, their debut furniture-specific client. “ScS is currently our only direct partnership with furniture retail, although others use outsourced Contact Centres that we support (an example of an outsourcer would be Ascensos) who offer multiple call centres for retailers in the one building. We are also partners with major software manufacturers like Calabrio who support OTTO in Germany,”
“The furniture retail market, like all others, has developed it’s omni-channel services for their clients and needs to be able to quickly and safely monitor, analyse and store these interactions. No-one has time to listen to every call or monitor every email for quality or compliance purposes, and that is where SVL can help.
“ScS are an excellent example of the breadth of support furniture retailers can access. They chose SVL to improve their omni-channel agent connectivity, quality management, workforce management, analytics, and outbound dialling capacity with a product called NICE CXOne.”
Anne added that this product will improve a range of services for ScS, including internal processes, accessing enhanced analytics to uncover powerful insights to improve client and staff satisfaction, improve employee engagement and morale, as well as scale their operations in a way that can expand across other areas of the group.
So, why it important for furniture retailers to maximise customer service and be able to monitor such interactions?
Anne explained: “In this post-covid world, footfall in retail is still struggling to return to previous levels. Indeed, it is speculated that buying behaviour has changed for good, with online and remote purchasing & customer service becoming even more central to every business. Whilst furniture retailing still attracts people in-store, are all these services truly joined up? Does the person shopping on the website, chatting to an operator, sending a tweet or phoning a helpline get the same quality of customer experience as someone in-store?
“Furniture retailers must spend time monitoring calls and channels in the same way an in-store supervisor would help a sales consultant improve their service. Developments in technology can quickly and easily search for issues within a contact and flag them up. Interactions are recorded and are made easily searchable, staff struggling with difficult issues can be supported, but the core of this is customer experience, and any interaction should be fast, well-informed and a pleasant experience, regardless of the channel they use.
“And, of course, customer service does not end with the sale, especially in furniture, but post-sale delivery and service create many interactions with warehouses and service centres which can occasionally be fraught. Our software extends across all interactions and captures the whole customer journey.”
Current interactions and engagements are just the tip of the iceberg too. Anne revealed that SVL is currently working on legacy data and how best to store such crucial information. “Furniture retailers, like all businesses, have mounds of data (recorded calls/emails etc…) that they hold onto for legal and quality purposes, but never access.
“We are working with a new product that stores all this data in the cloud and allows it to be searchable and accessed through a single “pane of glass”. This saves money, actually makes all this valuable data accessible once more and saves thousands of hours trawling though old calls to find the one that is needed. Where financial transactions have taken place and are monitored by the FCA, all this data must be stored and accessible for many years.”
Most, if not by now, every furniture retailer is going through their own digital transformation journey, no matter the size of the business. Including this area within that journey is one that Anne highly encourages so data doesn’t get lost. “The software on offer doesn’t have to be baffling or even hugely expensive, as it may have been in the past. If you recognise issues that you need help with, we are happy to advise.”
