A Central Source for Customer Service Needs

HISTORY:

In support of various marketing programs Ivie executed for its retail clients in the late 1990’s, we took on the responsibilities of customer service. With specific knowledge and access to marketing databases, our role was to help our clients’ consumers with questions about promotional events and loyalty programs. Our process of handling customer support evolved and changed with the requirements of each new promotion. Early in our evolution, we recognized that our performance measure had to go beyond the industry standards associated to call centers (i.e. Speed To Answer; Call Duration; Hold Time; Abandoned Calls). While we do not discount the importance of those measures, as a marketing company, we had a different perspective on the process. We were focused on the content of the call and the process of resolution. By 2003, Ivie had established a fully operational customer support center handling retail marketing customer service as an outsource for a few of our retail clients. In 2006, we implemented our first instance of the Ivie Beyond The Call®(BTC) Customer Service Management Software built primarily to increase internal efficiencies and establish true accountability as an outsource service provider.

CHALLENGE:

Over the course of more than 10 years of hands-on experience supporting marketing related customer service functions, Ivie recognized some common challenges faced by our retail clients.

• Disconnect between corporate customer service and field customer service entities
• Multiple areas within the corporate structure where customer service activities were taking place
• Reliance on knowledge specialists throughout the company to participate in customer issue resolution
• Lack of centralized communication process among entities who are called upon to help resolve customer issues
• Lack of accountability for resolution when issues are passed between various entities
• Little or no visibility given to the customer in the resolution process
• Lack of understanding overall customer service performance

In 2007, Ivie was contracted to provide an overall assessment of the Marketing operations of a large retail company. As part of our audit, we evaluated the company’s customer service process. Our discovery process unveiled all of the challenges noted above. This company had nearly twenty different departments / knowledge sources in the company that were called upon to aide in the customer issue resolution process. They did not have a structure for this type of collaboration and thus relied on passing emails, voice mails and sticky notes. Inevitably, there was no tracking to determine if issues were being resolved and customers found themselves explaining their issues to multiple people within the organization on multiple occasions.

SOLUTION:

Ivie BTC was implemented and became the central source for all customer service related issues. Every customer contact (phone call, email, store assisted call, etc.) was received by a single customer service team and a Customer Ticket was created in Ivie BTC. Once created, the BTC Ticket can be routed to the appropriate entity within the organization for input. This routing happens within BTC so as to retain all content and collaboration in one place and ensure complete status tracking and accountability. This retailer has over 80 individual users of BTC from 20+ areas within their company. The process allows customer service to function effectively and efficiently – no one entity (other than the customer service agents) is required to spend a significant amount of time working in BTC, but is alerted when there are tickets for which they need to participate. The customer gets visibility into the process and status of their inquiry and ultimately gets a response.

Learn more about BTC®

Topics:

Direct Mail
In-Store Signage
Print Procurement
Card Programs
FSI / Circulars
Catalogs
Page Production
Creative Services
Fulfillment Services
Media Services
Signature by Ivie
Customer Support Center
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