how maplin achieved 79% faster customer service response times
TRANSCRIPT
Webinar: How Maplin achieved 79% faster customer service response times
Webinar Agenda
• Introductions
• Presentation from Mark Dalgarno, Head of Customer Service @ Maplin Electronics
• Questions & Answers
• Further Questions, Comments & Wrap Up
Introductions
Host: Iain Swanston – Sales & Customer Service Expert
Presenter - Mark Dalgarno – Maplin, Head of Customer Service
Account Manager: Daniel Parker
Product Manager: David Lough
How Maplin achieved 79% faster customer service response times
BACKGROUND
• Maplin: Leading specialist retailer of consumer electronics in the UK. Maplin offer multi-channel access to their customer support, via mail, email, social media and telephone
• Large retail network of over 200 stores
• Customer support based in Rotherham
• 50 Agents working 24/7 days on Customer Service processing on average 3,000 customer contacts per week with a seasonal peak at Christmas of 50,000
Maplin in 2011
• Growing number of web enquiries
• All emails in one queue and manually allocated to agents
• All emails treated equally, no ability to prioritise without reading emails first
• High volume of staff handling enquiries
• Lack of ability to monitor responses, or view agent performance
• One enquiry could have multiple responses as all staff had access to one mailbox
• Growing response times
• No ability to track customer enquiries
• Outgrowing Outlook
• No realtime view of measurements against service level agreements
Maplin in 2011 continued
• Service model that was expensive to scale
• Reporting was all historical and time consuming
• Frustration amongst contact centre colleagues due to their inability to pass on relevant information to the wider business
• Sales opportunities missed as there was no prioritisation of messages
• Increasing staff costs due to volume and management of enquiries
• Damaging brand reputation which was built around Customer Service
• Made job role more challenging and manual
What was needed to move forward
Maplin were seeking a solution that offered improvements in productivity, better management & reporting and delivery of the Maplin service levels.
PRODUCTIVITY• First call resolution• Agent prompted with pre-populated template responses for speed and
consistency of quality• Active and waiting messages• Automated responses
MANAGEMENT• Forecasting Accuracy• Adherence to Schedule• Average age of query• Customer call frequency• Measurements against service level agreements
SERVICE• Call centre status metrics• Service level response time
Solution To Challenges
• All public-facing email addresses brought into one place where staff could be trained and managed
• Incoming enquiries routed into product and function specialists e.g. Customer Service, Complaints, Deliveries, etc.
• Responsibility of individual customer enquiries assigned to specific agents throughout their lifetime to build relationships
• Full history of enquiry available within ticket, including any attachments, reassignments of ticket and history of filters. This enables a full audit trail of prior actions on the ticket
• Maplin now have a variety of processes including Sales, Returns, Technical, Complaints, Faults, Stock Availability, Purchase Orders, Ebay, Order Errors, Customer Reviews and various internal processes
Complaints Process Automation
Business Impact
• The automation of processes within the Customer service department has led to the 79% decrease in response time
• This has happened while volume of enquiries increased by 20%
• No increase in staffing levels required
• Scalable solution in place which can grow with the business
• As consumer behaviour has changed, Logicalware have adapted MailManager to meet this
• Customer Service Department now able to offer Social Customer Service with existing staffing
• Emails and Social Media now handled in one solution
• No additional technical resource required as usage of Logicalware MailManager increases as Maplin have grown
Product Roadmap
• Maplin needed a supplier that worked with them and would develop the product based on their needs both now and in the future
• MailManager is a mature product, tried and tested for 11 years, and is continually evolving via a Customer User Group: for example, the addition of Social Media which was launched in 2014
• Innovations continues with live Chat and greater integration into business critical software such as ecommerce platforms, ordering systems, databases, CRM
Questions & Answers
Question 1: Who holds my data and what happens if the software goes down? Do we lose the data? Is the data secure?
Answered by David Lough:
Our entire platform is hosted on Amazon’s AWS service and the data is all held there. The data, however, still belongs to you, and will always be available to you. Nobody else can view your company’s data.
What happens if the software goes down? Do I lose it? Absolutely not. The database servers are continually backed up, we take snapshots every hour. If we do have to plan a short period of down time for any updates for example we notify our clients well in advance and it’s done in such a way that our mail-server still continues to capture the emails even if the application is down for 10 minutes. As soon as the application servers are back online the emails that have been collected are put straight into the application and you just continue as normal. There’s absolutely no risk to losing data.
Question 2: With regards to Social Media, what’s the best way to use the Mail-Manager tool?
Answered by Mark Dalgarno:
Mail-Manager lets us have templates, and you can also set up your queues and you can set up sub-queues to the queues. MailManager will scan the body of the text and will place the message in the correct category. MailManager segregates messages and this is great because we can make sure it goes to the correct colleague. We now have 10 colleagues who can monitor social media, and the general response time is within 15 minutes of a message being posted online.
Answered by David Lough:
The templates, from my point of view, are key. A lot of our clients use them and they allow you to have some standard responses already saved in your application. So for example, Maplin sell Raspberry Pi, and if there’s a new release, Maplin can create a template that they can use as auto-responders for their customers. So if the body of the email contains ‘Raspberry Pi’, they can send an automated email that will tell the customer that Raspberry Pi will be available at the end of the month, or something to that effect.
Question 3: What’s the user experience for your colleagues in Customer Service? Are they happy using the software?
Answered by Mark Dalgarno:
It’s very easy to train people on it. I have colleagues who comment on how much easier MailManager is to use than the solutions of their previous employers. They feel it’s really slick and clean and easy, it’s uncluttered and uncomplicated. It only shows you what you need to access as you are doing it, therefore you don’t need to worry about going in to other extra-complicated parts of the system to do something. In addition to that, if you start writing an email and you need to do something else, Logicalware saves messages so you don’t lose them. This is extremely helpful as when we used the Outlook functionality in the past we would close down the email and lose all our work and have to start again. As you can imagine this was very frustrating.
Wrap Up And Next Steps
• If you would like us to help you automate and improve your customer journeys and business processes we can map out your highest traffic process for £975 + VAT per day and demonstrate how you can then create your own automations.
• We will be in contact in the next 24 hours with a recording of the Webinar for you to share internally and discuss any next steps you feel would be appropriate.
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