Le fabricant de vêtements de sport est désormais en mesure de répondre à l'appel

December 10, 2015

With the Christmas holiday shopping season in full swing, retailers are seeing a crushing load of calls to their contact centers. Those that prepared for the onslaught will see the results when the shopping eases. Those that didn’t prepare will pay the price.

One company that saw a need and tackled it head-on was Columbia Sportswear, a Portland, Oregon-based outdoor wear company. In a article de blog récent, Gavin Gustafson — Communications Manager at cloud call center leader inContact – talked about how Columbia wanted to grow its own call center rapidly, but had a myriad list of needs it also wanted to be addressed.

“Offering outstanding customer support is a primary mission for outdoor apparel manufacturer Columbia Sportswear, but their PBX (Nouvelles – Alerte)-based system had long been a bottleneck for their contact center and IT teams,” Gustafson wrote. “In 2010, Kristina Coker, Enterprise Mobility & Telecommunications Engineer, created a Request for Proposal (RFP) with a long wish list of ideal characteristics of a new contact center system.”

That list included:

• Support for a wider range of communication channels
• Scalability to satisfy seasonal call volumes
• Flexibility to handle growth
• Resiliency to outages
• Quick and simple access to live call statistics
• Easy-to-use, allowing business owners to make system changes as needed.

Columbia was about to acquire new offices, so supporting these additional locations was important. It was also noted that e-commerce was being added to their website so the company needed to support SMS, chat, email, and click-to-call functionality. “We had a lot of changes on the roadmap, and we needed a solution that was stable, flexible, and scalable for our call center,” Coker told Gustafson.

InContact was able to provide everything Columbia needed, and more.

“With inContact, Columbia can manage agents in multiple buildings, states, and even multiple countries on a single platform regardless of physical location, team size, call volume, or other normal constraints of a PBX-based solution,” Gustafson said. “Furthermore, Columbia’s contact center managers are no longer dependent on IT to make simple or complex changes.”

Now, Columbia’s managers can get detailed reports that measure agent performance and live call statistics in real time. Previously, they had to pull data from three separate systems so they often ended up with reports that painted different pictures, because the process was inconsistent.

Columbia Sportswear has seen the following results since implementing inContact cloud solutions:

• Talk time reduced by an average of 20 seconds;
• Sales orders increased 56 percent and revenue 59 percent;
• Earned a customer satisfaction score of 93.6 percent while absorbing and handling a 34 percent increase in call volume;
• 1,346 man hours saved for the year.

For more information on how Columbia Sportswear improved their customer service operations with inContact Cloud Solutions, you can download the comprehensive case study here.