Industry Strategy Guide

EMEA Region

Customer Service Strategies for the Retail Industry

Customer Service Strategies for the Retail Industry

Table of Contents
3 4 Introduction The Key Challenges Facing the Retail Industry
The Customer Experience is Becoming Even More Important Changing Consumer Demographics and Channel Preference Present New Challenges Keeping Costs Down is Difficult

10 The Strategic Role of the Contact Centre in Retail

Strategy 1: Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions Strategy 2: Offer an intelligent Customer Front Door Strategy 3: Initiate Proactive Contact Strategy 4: Make More Effective Use of Customer Data and Segmentation Strategy 5: Leverage Demographic Profiling to Establish Customer Intimacy Strategy 6: Offer Live Agent Assistance on Web Sites Strategy 7: Handle Calls More Intelligently Strategy 8: Train Temporary Agents with Scripting or E-Learning Strategy 9: Pursue Open IP Migration Strategy 10: Boost Agent Productivity through Interaction Blending

17 The Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre 20 Case Study 24 Conclusion

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Introduction
Consumer spending is under pressure. With many retailers chasing ever fewer euros with the very same merchandise, tremendous price competition has ensued. However, only the largest retailers with huge economies of scale are winning this game. There are opportunities to succeed other than offering the best deal, but retailers are having trouble exploiting them because they are unable to differentiate their businesses, respond to changing demographics, or contain contact centre costs without negatively impacting customer service and sales. Retailers that are able to define and implement solutions to these challenges are those that will successfully compete and thrive into the future. This paper examines the strategic role of the contact centre in the retail industry, and how it can deliver the increased revenues and cost savings that will drive profitability and shareholder value. The paper introduces ten essential strategies you can use to realise this potential by improving the customer experience, leveraging cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and promoting agent productivity and satisfaction: Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions Offer an intelligent Customer Front Door Initiate Proactive Contact Make More Effective Use of Customer Data and Segmentation Leverage Demographic Profiling to Establish Customer Intimacy Offer Live Agent Assistance on Web Sites Handle Calls More Intelligently Train Temporary Agents with Scripting or E-Learning Pursue Open IP Migration Boost Agent Productivity through Interaction Blending This paper further explains how the Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre provides integrated communication technologies to optimise customer traffic, internal resources, and business outcomes for todays changing conditions. It concludes with a real-world customer case study that illustrates how Mir Knigi has used Genesys solutions to make its contact centre vision a reality.

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The Key Challenges Facing the Retail Industry

The Customer Experience is Becoming Even More Important
According to Bloomberg, in December 2007 retail sales in the euro area declined 2% from a year earlier, the biggest drop in at least 13 years. Business has gradually picked up, but discretionary consumer spending is still under pressure in many countries from a variety of factors, including higher energy and food costs, the Customers have come to expect housing slump, and high levels of consumer debt accompanied by tighter multi-channel retailing availability credit. Large discounters, wholesale clubs, and cash-and-carry stores (in-store, online, catalogue/call compensate for weaker demand by leveraging their huge economies centre, kiosk, television, mobile, of scale to lower their already rock bottom prices even further. Other etc.). Now, they are seeking a retailers stuck with excess inventories have watched their profit margins seamless experience across channels. plummet after instituting steep price discounts. Amidst growing commoditisation, the largest retailers are increasing their market concentration. The worlds 10 largest retailers captured 30.1% of the 250 largest retailers sales, up from 29.4% in 2005.

Economic Concentration of Top 10 Retailers, 2006

Top 250 Rank
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Name of Company
Wal-Mart Carrefour Home Depot Tesco Metro Kroger Target Costco Sears Holdings Schwarz

Country of Origin
US France US UK Germany US US US US Germany Top 10 Top 250 Top 10 Share of Total

2006 Retail Sales (US$M)

344,992 97,861 90,837 79,976 74,857 66,111 59,490 58,963 53,012 52,422 978,521 3,246,255 30.1%

2006 Retail Sales Growth

10.4% 4.6% 11.4% 11.5% 7.4% 9.2% 13.1% 13.7% 7.9% 13.2% 10.2% 9.2%

Source: Published Company Data and Planet Retail

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To increase profits and market share, differentiation through providing a better customer experience may be one of the few opportunities retailers have to rise above the price competition. And the stakes are high. The Genesys Consumer Survey 2007 Europe discovered that 73% of European consumers said they would do business with a company based on a great contact centre experience. Of these, 15% would do so even if prices were higher than average. Although retail has always been a customer-focused industry, there are additional opportunities to improve the customer experience. For a start, multi-channel service delivery requires renewed attention. Multi-channel shoppers generate 20-25% more profit than the average customer. However, these customers have low store loyalty across channels. A survey by Forrester Research found that 49% of multichannel customers bought their most recent cross-channel purchase from a different offline retailer than the one where they conducted their online research. And, consumers who buy online move back and forth between competing Web sites. Because customers have come to expect multi-channel availability (in-store, online, catalogue/call centre, kiosk, special order, television, mobile, etc.) retailers can no longer rely on this to set themselves apart from the competition. To increase loyalty, multi-channel retailers will have to raise the bar on their customer service by improving the customer experience in non-store channels and by unifying the customer experience across channels. Increasingly, retailers will need to use their Web sites to engage with their customers and will also need to extend transactional capabilities across channels. For instance, a customer may want to order a product online, but pick it up in the store to avoid shipping fees. The multi-channel experience is lacking in a number of other areas. Retailers often fail to answer e-mails from their customers. In the better supported call centre, retailers provide more reliable service, but fail to take advantage of opportunities to personalise the interaction. Retailers also need to do a better job of reaching out to their valued customers. Even though proactive contact can build brand, enhance customer service and increase revenue, proactive customer service is only a small portion of all outbound contact centre activity. Further, the retail industry has trouble coping with peak demand proceeding holidays, particularly during November and December when most retailers earn between 25-40% of their entire yearly revenue. Because poor service during this time translates into permanent customer losses and lower revenues, handling peak demand traffic should be a major priority.

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Changing Consumer Demographics and Channel Preference Present New Challenges

Deloittes recent report, The 2008 Global Powers of Retailing, reveals that the top 50 fastest-growing retailers increased sales an average of 28.7% over the 2001-2006 period, more than three times the rate of the top 250 retailers. Only some of this growth came from focusing on emerging global markets and high-growth product categories. Retailers also succeeded by offering their customers a greater value proposition. In the contact centre, retailers can deliver higher value by understanding specific customer needs and by optimising channel interactions. Mass marketing is losing its effectiveness and is also increasingly difficult to do because of tighter consumer privacy laws. Instead, retailers will need to focus on the purchasing behaviour of unique demographic segments to deliver a meaningful value proposition. Demographic dichotomies (age, ethnicity, and income) will increase over the next decade. For instance, the most rapidly growing age segment in Europe will be persons aged 60 years and older, expected to grow from 22% in 2005 to 36% in 2050. During the same time period, the share of people aged 80 years and more is predicted to nearly triple from 4% to 11%. This is bad news for retailers, because it is at approximately age 70 that spending on many goods is believed to decline.

Percentage Change in 60-79 Population for Selected Countries, Past and Present

Growth in the 60-79 year age segment from 2005 to 2020 will range between 8% for Germany to more than 30% for countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, and France.

Source: UN Population Database, 2007

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To compensate for lost sales, retailers will need to turn their attention to both Generation Y customers and to Millennial customers under age 35. But, these consumers will be tough targets as well because they are more fragmented into niche interest markets, demand more personalisation and are more difficult to reach with conventional media. Retailers will have to capture their attention with product, channel, and brand strategies designed specifically for their needs. Research demonstrates that customers would value increased personalised selling, with the categories of electronics, books/music, health and personal care, and fashion being the most popular. According to a survey of consumers in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States by Capgemini, half of consumers are willing to share information about their buying behaviour and lifestyle with retailers in exchange for receiving a special promotion (79%), information on new products (45%), and special services (40%).

Degree Consumers Would Appreciate Receiving Personalised Offerings (% saying would appreciate/would greatly appreciate)

Consumer interest in receiving personalised products, services, and promotions vary by category. More than half of consumers said they would value personalised offerings for electronics, books/music, health and personal care, and fashion.

Source: Capgemini

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In addition to demographics, the channel preferences of retail consumers are also changing. JupiterResearch forecasts that 7% of all European retail spending will be channelled through the Internet in 2010, versus only 2.3% in 2004. The online channel share in 2010 will range from 1.3% in Greece to 13.2% in the United Kingdom. Average spending per European online buyer will double to 806 in 2010 from 403 in 2004.

Eurpopean Online Retail Spending will Total 117.1 Billion in 2010

Online retail spending in Europe will total 117.1 billion in 2010, up from 32.3 in 2004.

Source: JupiterResearch Internet Shopping Model, 11/05 (Western Europe only)

As the online channel grows in importance, retailers stand to lose cross- and up-selling opportunities that have been facilitated in stores by sales associates. This issue indicates the need for agent interaction to provide shoppers with assistance and information as they shop online.

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Keeping Costs Down is Difficult

Given the uncertainty in consumer spending, contact centre cost containment is gaining importance for retailers. However, for a variety of reasons, they struggle with the age-old problem of trying to keep costs low without negatively impacting customer service and sales. Seasonal spikes in demand Retailers are constantly challenged by the tremendous increase in customer activity before major holidays, such as Christmas and Mothers Day. To cope, they try to bring in enough temporary staff to handle increased activity, but this drives up costs and often still leaves the retailer short-staffed. Retailers need additional ways to accommodate seasonal spikes in demand. For instance, they might direct incoming calls to the contact centre during busy times. And, when the contact centre is overwhelmed, it might want to utilise outsourced resources or encourage the use of self-service. Reluctance to use outsourcing Because inbound up- and cross-selling is mission critical for retail profits, the retail industry has been reluctant to increase its use of outsourcing. Devising ways to intelligently use lower-cost outsourcing for volume spikes and for non-sales requests would represent significant cost savings for the contact centre. Handling times are too long Retail contact centres can take too long to handle calls and therefore encounter excessive costs when attempting to deliver the same level of service to every customer rather than segmenting high-value customers and offering them the very best service. Another factor unnecessarily increasing handling times is that call centres cant identify their customers when they call and route them to the appropriate product specialist. Further, a complete picture of the customers previous history of interactions is rarely accessible, particularly if the activities occurred across several channels, such as phone, e-mail, and the Web site. Agents not only waste valuable time gathering information they should already know, but they also lose out on important opportunities to increase sales. The migration to IP-based contact centres is difficult Retailers are continuing to migrate to IP-based contact centres as they recognise the inherent benefits that can be gained by moving from closed proprietary solutions to a more standards-based environment. Still, one of the biggest concerns for many retailers considering the move to IP is how to leverage existing systems. More specifically, they must be convinced that they will not only gain new features and functionality, but will not lose existing applications or functionalities. Equally important is the ability to select and deploy new functionality whilst retaining compatibility with a variety of new or existing applications and product vendors.

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The Strategic Role of the Contact Centre in Retail

Retailers have always viewed their contact centres as critical to the success of their business. With increasing commoditisation and pressures on the bottom line, contact centres are an even greater strategic asset for survival and will have to go the extra mile to deliver value. Retail contact centres have the opportunity to improve the quality of customer service to help differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Fundamental customer service goals that should be delivered by todays contact centre include cross-selling and up-selling more products and services by understanding customer needs, and running more cost efficient operations by increasing agent productivity. Further, contact centres are now considered a key instrument in changing the publics perception of a company, creating a great customer experience, and executing on the business goals of the company as a whole.

Depending on contact centre maturity and business requirements, here are ten possible strategies to make a retailers customer service goals a reality.

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Strategy 1: Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions

The first step in offering an exceptional customer experience is to offer multi-channel contact centre interactions that accommodate where the customer likes to shop (in-store, online, catalogue/call centre, kiosk, television, or mobile), and how they like to communicate (phone, fax, e-mail, SMS, and perhaps even Web chat) so that prospects and customers can conduct business with you exactly where, when and how they like. For instance, the Genesys Consumer Survey 2007 Europe found that 89% of consumers would like to communicate with a company via e-mail and 50% say that e-mail is their most preferred method of communication.

89% of European consumers would like to communicate with a company via e-mail and 50% say that e-mail is their most preferred method of communication.

With most retailers offering multi-channel shopping availability, retailers need to provide customers with a seamless experience across all channels to set themselves apart from the competition. Ensuring that customer interactions are as consistent and efficient as possible will help build a solid relationship with the customer. For example, if a customer (lets call her Sophie) had gone online to order some books, but decided the shipping cost was too high, she could simply request to pick her books up at the store. Or, conversely, if Sophie had purchased a product online and decided to return it, she could take it back to the store rather than going through the hassle of shipping the package back to the retailer. Streamlining and sharing custom data across channels helps retailers create a more complete customer profile which can be used to identify and improve cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, lower operating costs, and promote operational efficiency.

For relationship selling, service representatives require a unified view of interactions across all channels to effectively promote and sell services. In the early promotional stage, this means ensuring that retailers dont repeat turned-down offers to customers at different touch points, such as the call centre and the Web. As the customer responds to the promotion, customer service representatives can pick up where the customer left off at each stage in the sales process, regardless of which channel the customer was using.

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Strategy 2: Offer an intelligent Customer Front DoorTM

When customers use the catalogue/call centre service channel or phone a store, an automated call answering technology manages the interaction. Commonly known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), these systems provide the customers first impression of the retailer and have a strong impact on brand image. The types of retail activities frequently automated by an IVR system include: store locations and directions, account and credit information, order delivery status and, perhaps, order placement when agents are busy. Whilst automated IVRs have been effective in reducing call volumes and delivering elementary self-service, they have also added significant complexity and frustration for the consumer because of confusing menus, long hold times, misroutes, and requirements to repeat the same information. The intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) is a transformative self-service solution that reshapes call answering by applying business logic to: Discern the identity and intent of a caller in the fewest steps Gather relevant information from back-end data or workflow to understand the context of their call Determine how to treat callers based on preferences, resource availability, and business rules Connect them to the right response, including self-service, proactive notification, automatic callback, or assisted-service. An example: IVR: Thank you for calling The Value Warehouse. How can we help you? Sophie: I would like directions to your nearest store. The iCFD application automatically identifies Sophie and fulfils her request for directions without having to prompt her for additional data. This call could have been easily handled by self-service, but Sophie receives assisted-service because she is a platinum (or high value) customer for whom the retailer wants to provide the very best service, every time, even for simple requests. After providing directions, the agent informs Sophie of promotional items at the store in which she might be interested, based on her prior purchase history.

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Strategy 3: Initiate Proactive Contact

Proactive outbound communications is a way for retailers build brand, enhance customer service, increase revenue, and set their service apart from the competition. With everyone vying for their business, customers like to know that businesses value Customers value proactive outbound them. Results of the Genesys Consumer Survey 2007 Europe communications - 88% of consumers reveal that 89% of consumers would have a more positive opinion of would like to receive proactive a supplier after receiving a courtesy call just to thank them for their communications from companies to business or ask them how satisfied they are. However, only 39% had keep them informed about service actually received this type of courtesy call. delivery and/or other products and services that may be of interest to them. The same Genesys survey shows that 88% of consumers would like to receive proactive communications from companies to keep them informed about service delivery and/or other products and services that may be of interest to them. Retailers can delight their customers by sending regular proactive notifications to them about the status of their orders, from confirmation through to delivery. Proactive contact management is also a useful form of automated telemarketing to scale the contact centre for increased cross-selling and up-selling activities. Retailers can notify their customers about special promotions or offers that match their interests, prior buying behaviour, or demographic data. For example, Sophie is a good department store customer and the store wants to ensure that she knows that her business is valued. One way the store does this is by proactively sending Sophie a notice on her birthday. The notification wishes Sophie a very happy birthday and tells her that she is eligible for a 25% discount on a purchase made within the next month. The notification even mentions some newly arrived items that Sophie might be interested in based on her previous purchases.

Strategy 4: Make More Effective Use of Customer Data and Segmentation

Given that many retail products are commodities vulnerable to significant price competition, some retailers are de-emphasising their product approach to selling. Instead, they are exploring cross-sell and up-sell strategies based on the customer relationship to capture higher-value sales opportunities. In this new paradigm, contact centres reach out to individual customers with products, services, and prices designed specifically to attract them and meet their needs.

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Front-office integration with the contact centre helps to increase sales. Agents are able to provide customised offers based on the customers recent interactions across all channels, existing products and services, and detailed knowledge of the customers demographics, lifestyle, and propensity to buy.

To make relationship selling a success, front-office integration with the call centre gives agents a 360-degree view of the customer, which helps in focusing on long-term customer profitability. Sales representatives have access to the right information across all touch points to enable effective interaction with the customer. In this way, customers may receive customised offers based on their current behaviour, recent interactions across all channels, existing products and services, as well as detailed knowledge of their demographics, lifestyle, and propensity to buy. Going one step further, high-value customers may interact, when possible, with a dedicated sales representative who is intimately familiar with their history and needs.

Imagine the power of a sales agent who has a complete picture of a customers profile when the customer calls. Consider Sophie, a customer who has just contacted the catalogue/call centre to order a sweater. The sales agent sees from her profile that she is a Generation Y consumer with a high income who has ordered complete outfits rather than individual apparel items in the past. The sales agent knows that Sophie is a great candidate for a cross-selling offer. Because the agent knows that Generation Y consumers are typically motivated by self-image and interested in keeping up with style trends, the agent suggests a pair of expensive jeans from a well-known designers label that had just arrived in the store. Intrigued, Sophie readily accepts the offer.

Strategy 5: Leverage Demographic Profiling to Establish Customer Intimacy

Retailers are armed with a wealth of demographic details that they can leverage for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and theyve long used their knowledge about customers to implement targeted marketing campaigns. However, retailers can do even more with demographic assets to enhance the relationship with their customers. Demographic matching is a way to assign the customer to an agent who has a common demographic profile. The result is that customers get to interact with agents who will more easily relate to the customer because they share certain commonalities, such as native language, age range, degree of technical or product competence, and so on.

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Strategy 6: Offer Live Agent Assistance on Web Sites

The increasing preference for the Internet channel will require retailers to offer live agent assistance to increase the size of shopping carts. Retailers can offer click-to-chat and click-tocall options to help customers locate products and answer questions about merchandise, such as product features and warranties. Or, retailers can engage online customers in conversations when available agents identify good candidates for cross-selling and up-selling.

Strategy 7: Handle Calls More Intelligently

When taking calls, top priorities for retailers as they look to control contact centre costs are to make sure they still provide outstanding customer service and meet revenue objectives. Skills-based routing, virtual hold, and business priority routing are three key strategies for meeting service requirements as efficiently as possible whilst also making the most of opportunities to drive new revenues.

Rather than costly delivery of the same level of service to every customer, retailers can segment their high-value customers and offer them the very best service using business priority routing.

An IVR system not only identifies customers, but also why they are calling With this knowledge, skills-based routing determines where the call should be directed either to a self-service application, or to an agent most qualified to efficiently handle the call based on specialised merchandise knowledge, selling or language skills, or the ability to handle a specific type of service, billing, or sales enquiry. This helps to improve first call resolution and reduce average handling times.

During times of peak volume, virtual hold technology allows customers to receive a callback at a convenient time rather than to wait on hold. This technique improves call response times and increases customer satisfaction levels without adding costs for additional resources. Business priority routing uses business rules to prioritise calls based on customer value, customer segments, available channel resources, hold times, and other factors. A contact centre might take advantage of business process routing to increase the time spent on cross-selling and up-selling during times of low call volume. Also, by using business priority routing, retailers can extend the very best service to their high-value customers instead of routing them to a self-service system. When Sophie, a loyal and profitable customer rings to check her credit account and there are several available agents, she could be transferred to an agent who not only answers Sophies questions, but also informs her of a new promotion available just for valued customers.

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Strategy 8: Train Temporary Agents with Scripting or E-Learning

Heavy reliance on temporary agents means that retailers must have a way to quickly and cost effectively train its staff. During a call, some form of scripting or integration of an e-learning application can help ensure the delivery of consistent and accurate information, reduce training costs, and enable agents to sell products without extensive product knowledge. These selling tools can inform an agent of any cross- and up-sell opportunities along with the customers propensity to purchase, as calculated by an offer engine. The script can even indicate how much time is necessary to pitch the offer, and thus help the agent gauge call duration more effectively.

Strategy 9: Pursue Open IP Migration

The widespread emergence of the open standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) means retailers no longer need to rip out existing legacy systems to add new IP functionality. The open, standards-based SIP approach maximises the benefits of IP networking by enabling application portability, technology compatibility from multiple vendors, consolidation of application infrastructure, and reduced total cost of ownership. One of the major business drivers in the shift to IP technology is virtualisation. A Virtual Contact Centre allows geographically dispersed contact centre agents to operate as a single, winning team. Regardless of where the contact centre agents are located, they can be called upon, as available, to ensure appropriate response levels and provide access to needed expertise. Operating multiple locations as one contact centre will not only help to quell concerns about providing quality customer service, but it can be far more effective for utilisation of agents and will also cut costs without negatively impacting customer service. Calls coming into the store can be routed to the call centre during busy times or calls to overloaded call centres can be transferred to less busy locations. Virtualisation will also allow outsourced resources to be utilised in a way that will not jeopardise valued customer relationships. Outsourced staff can be brought into the fold during peak periods such as holidays to handle routine types of calls, whilst more demanding interactions can still be handled at local contact centres.

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For example, Sophie has contacted a local department store to find out if the store carriers a particular brand. But its two days before Mothers Day, and staff can barely keep up with in-store demand. So, rather than keeping Sophie on hold, her call is routed to the call centre where the agent is able to answer her question.

Strategy 10: Boost Agent Productivity through Interaction Blending

Retailers benefit from optimising their agents time as much as possible. Call blending allows agents to handle both inbound and outbound sales calls as call volume and skills permit, whilst task blending allows agents to offer their assistance at different interaction channels. For instance, contact center agents can be switched to answering e-mails or engaging in text chats with customers. Not only does this maximise staff productivity, but interaction blending also breaks up the potential monotony of the position.

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre is designed to transform customer service by automatically optimising customer traffic, internal resources, and business outcomes. Whilst contact centres can manually adjust to changing patterns, an advanced or dynamic contact centre has the know-how and technology to make automatic adjustments in real time. As contact centres become increasingly important channels, retail companies can convert themselves to dynamic contact centres to automatically optimise the customer experience, foster cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and increase contact centre representative productivity.

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre

The Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre provides integrated and orchestrated customer service capabilities to optimise the customer experience, foster cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and increase agent productivity and satisfaction.

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The Genesys Dynamic Contact Centre provides key customer service capabilities that are integrated and orchestrated to fulfil these objectives: Customer-Centric Routing puts an end to customer frustration by ensuring each interaction is routed to the ideal resource with the right information no matter where that resource is located in your organisation. This helps you increase first-call resolution rates, meet variable call volumes with limited resources, increase cross-sell and up-sell rates, and improve agent satisfaction. Business Process Routing integrates phone, e-mail, and fax with back office business processes to improve agent productivity and customer service. Through this integration, contact centre resources can be leveraged as part of workflow processes such as processing a claim, fax, work order, or other interaction. Ultimately, contact centre and back-office processes are streamlined and agent utilisation is improved. Workforce Management and Optimisation are central to managing and optimising contact centre resources. They give you control over your operations by allowing you to forecast and schedule agents dynamically based on traffic volumes and resource availability across a multi-site, multi-channel environment. Proactive Contact Management provides a personalised customer interaction experience by allowing you to send relevant outbound notifications at any time. It also enables you to create, modify, run, and report on voice and multimedia outbound campaigns for proactive customer contact and sustained communications. Integrated Self-Service provides a holistic caller experience whilst reducing handling times and service delivery costs. These capabilities provide touch-tone or speech-enabled access for conversational exchange to identify and resolve routine customer requests and transfer more complex calls to the best-skilled agent. Internet and Multimedia Integration capabilities allow customers to interact with you the way they want to, when they want to through voice, e-mail, Web chat, Instant Messaging, and even video calls.

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Branch, Remote, and Expert Integration allow you to extend your contact centre to manage interactions based on business strategies and objectives. For example, higher-valued clients might be sent to a highly skilled resource located within a branch office, rather than being sent to the general call centre. The Virtual Contact Centre, enabled by Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, allows geographically dispersed contact centre agents to operate as a single, winning team. Regardless of where the contact centre agents are located, they can be called upon, as available, to ensure appropriate response levels and provide access to needed expertise. Real-Time Offer Management helps you capitalise on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by providing the capabilities to recommend an offer to an agent in real time, based on a customers background, history, and interaction type. Reporting and Analytics allow you to assess your contact centre and customer service activity by providing real-time and historical views on the performance metrics of contact centre objectives and how these metrics change over time.

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Case Study
Genesys is the worlds No.1 contact centre software company. Global leaders in 28 industries transform customer service with Genesys, including: 3 of the worlds 10 largest general merchandisers 4 of the worlds 15 largest specialty retailers 6 of the worlds 25 largest variety stores 2 of the worlds 5 largest household/personal products companies

Mir Knigi
Founded in 1989, the Mir Knigi company is currently ranked among the leaders in Russias catalogue retail market, focusing primarily on the sale of books. The company is rapidly developing and expanding its customer base. In the last five years the company has doubled its number of customers to over four million. Every month Mir Knigi processes over one million client orders.

In the retail catalogue sector, customer service is a top priority. With the help of our new Genesys contact centre solution, we see a significant improvement in the delivery of enhanced customer care to our expanding client base. Andrey Kulgeiko,

The major drivers of Mir Knigis success are the broad assortment of quality products, close co-operation with partners (including all the major publishing houses), favourable pricing, and professional marketing. Mir Knigi has substantial growth potential both domestically and in foreign markets. As part of this growth drive, the company started to actively develop their e-commerce business in 2006 and also offered the Mir Knigi catalogue to customers in Ukraine.

Mir Knigi decided that, to support this growth, it was essential to upgrade the customer interaction management system. The improvements Director of IT Department to the Mir Knigi contact centre, located in Moscow, were needed to Mir Knigi ensure increased customer satisfaction, first call resolution, increased performance targets for the processing and filing of customer enquiries, and the execution of targeted outbound marketing campaigns.

The Challenge
Mir Knigis contact centre is engaged in serving customers, solving any delivery and quality issues, as well as filing and processing orders. Additionally, its task is to execute outbound campaigns for marketing, quality assurance, and the assessment of customer satisfaction.

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A recent examination of business processes at Mir Knigi showed that inconsistent reporting and monitoring of the corporate contact centre hampered the productivity of the company and posed a threat that might cause a potential slowdown in customer growth. The lack of sufficient data meant that it was impossible to measure the peak contact centre load and the number of agents required to satisfy customer demand. This had led to an unacceptable number of lost calls. In addition, Mir Knigi management aimed to be more proactive in its communication with customers through effective outbound marketing campaigns. The existing contact centre solution had no capacity for development, and could not provide the necessary functions, such as skills-based routing, real-time system monitoring, IVR, queuing, or performance measurement. Faced with an evolving market situation and its own inability to adapt to those changes without a major shift in technology, the company decided to tackle the issues head on. Because effective interaction with customers is a key driver of our success, one of the most pressing tasks for Mir Knigi was to optimise the contact centre infrastructure, upgrade its operations, and offer a higher level of service to our clients, stated Andrey Kulgeiko, Director of IT at Mir Knigi. This meant improving the contact centre monitoring and reporting capabilities, rationalising the premise-based equipment, and cutting telecommunication charges to achieve a lower total cost of ownership. By boosting the contact centres performance we were confident that customer satisfaction levels would increase. And, of course, we also hoped to benefit from reductions in management and maintenance costs, stated Svetlana Promyslova, Director of Customer Relations at Mir Knigi. The importance of the optimisation program and its influence on Mir Knigis business processes made the choice of a technical partner for the project all the more difficult. It was obvious that the company needed to select a reliable vendor that could provide a solution with rich functionality and extensive understanding of their industry. To make the decision, Mir Knigi considered several major contact centre vendors, looking at the capabilities of their solutions in regard to software functionality, infrastructure independence, the flexibility of the call routing options, and the ability to include IVR and outbound communication. Having assessed vendors on these aspects and on their standing within the industry in terms of technological vision and future proofing, Mir Knigi selected Genesys.

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The Solution
The Genesys solution combines the power of a time-tested framework and intelligent routing capabilities with the underlying advantages of simplified deployment, an integrated architecture, a database, and single-point of administration. In addition, the Genesys solution also contains an advanced IVR. We chose Genesys for a number of reasons: the Genesys name within the industry, the high quality of functionality, the fact that we would not need major hardware investments and, of course, the openness of the solution. The company was also extremely flexible and allowed us to trial the solution over a six month period, explained Mr Kulgeiko. This trial period allowed for the gradual migration to Genesys platform in two phases. In the first trial phase, Mir Knigi specialists were able to familiarise themselves with the advantages of Genesys technology and work on such issues as how best to use the Genesys solution to create user-defined rules (to meet Mir Knigis unique business criteria), routing strategies, and various IVR scenarios. The second phase involved the complete migration to Genesys. Following the implementation the Genesys team stayed with Mir Knigi for three weeks to thoroughly test the solution and ensure that Mir Knigi staff were comfortable with the new system. With Genesys, Mir Knigi now had installed a solution to help boost performance, thanks to the underlying frameworks ability to share customer data with predictive routing capabilities. The routing environment identified and routed customer interactions based on Mir Knigis specific routing strategies. Incoming calls are automatically routed to the agent who has been available for the longest period, through complex client segmentation business rules. Also, the solution allows an agent to execute consulting calls with other company specialists, or to transfer the customer to an appropriate specialist. Genesys also included a tool that allowed Mir Knigis managers to access both real-time monitoring and historical reporting capabilities, which provided users with the ability to monitor statistics such as the number of interactions in queue, average wait times, service level adherence, and current agent activity. These business statistics provided visibility of actual performance so that Mir Knigi could drive and reward correct agent behaviour. Genesys also provided Mir Knigi with comprehensive information analysis with intelligent, business-oriented historical reporting. The historical reporting feature tracks all necessary data related to contact centre activity and records it to a database. Mir Knigi was highly satisfied with the new solution but, due to the continued growth of their business, decided to move to IP with the Genesys SIP Server linking all the agents into one virtual contact centre. Mir Knigi management understood the necessity to migrate but were initially apprehensive that the change of platform would require changes to the

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business logic of call distribution and to the desktop application. We had major worries that the move from the Ericsson PBX to the Genesys SIP Server would not be smooth and would require considerable changes to our applications and extra costs. However, we were extremely pleasantly surprised, remembers Mrs. Promyslova. In fact, the contact centre never stopped functioning during the migration period. An initial group of agents, during a test phase, moved onto IP with the rest remaining on TDM. Once the questions regarding the solution had been solved, all agents moved onto the SIP Server. No changes were found to be necessary to the desktop application, and the migration did not involve any changes in the business rules, much to the satisfaction of Mir Knigi.

Results
Mir Knigi has been able to increase its service levels, and this improvement has been widely acknowledged by customers during the outbound quality assurance campaigns. First call resolution figures are now close to 100%. The solution has also enabled Mir Knigi to develop its outbound marketing campaigns. Using the more reliable and functionally rich call handling system provided by Genesys, Mir Knigi has been able to improve the control over its contact centre. This has helped reduce the cost of both staff management and equipment maintenance. The implementation of the Genesys solution has also given Mir Knigi a better understanding of the contact centres load, which has led to managing human resources more effectively, ensuring enough agents are available at peak times, and reducing the number of agents working at off-peak times. With the use of Genesys, Mir Knigi has been able to improve both the monitoring and reporting of its contact centre. The move to the Genesys SIP Server has improved customer service by allowing all 80 agents, wherever they are situated, to be available to callers. It has also helped to reduce costs through using soft IP end-points. Employing the Genesys SIP Server has also resulted in a reduction of both staff management and equipment maintenance costs, with everything under the control of network administrators. The Genesys contact centre solution has helped our company to operate more effectively, professionally, and predictably. According to quality assessment campaigns, Mir Knigis clients are satisfied with the work of the upgraded contact centre and have strong loyalty to the company, stated Mr Kulgeiko. In the retail catalogue sector, customer service is a top priority. With the help of our new Genesys contact centre solution we see a significant improvement in the delivery of enhanced customer care to our expanding client base. Given the benefits that Genesys has brought to Mir Knigi, it is no surprise that the company wishes to follow this initial success, and aims to further improve its operations. The company plans to upgrade its customer segmentation strategies and deploy advanced customer selfservice scenarios. These innovations are likely to keep Mir Knigi ahead of its competitors, and further enhance its reputation for providing customer-focused services.

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Conclusion
As this Strategy Guide has detailed, the retail industry currently faces its own unique set of contact centre challenges. Commoditisation and increasing price competition mean that customer service is increasingly important for winning new, and retaining existing, customers. Unifying the customer experience across channels, offering proactive customer service, and coping with busy holiday shopping times are just a few ways retailers can differentiate their business. In addition, retailers should minimise product-centric approaches to selling, and instead develop cross-selling and up-selling strategies that maximise customer value by understanding which products meet the needs of a specific target audience. And, as online retailing growth slows, in part due to Internet fatigue, retailers need to offer their customers a more interactive online experience. Further, cost containment should be balanced against escalating revenue generation expectations a tough task for contact centres that lack virtualisation as a technique to handle spikes in demand. To meet these contact centre challenges, retailers can strive to transform their operations into dynamic contact centres that ensure an excellent customer experience across channels, increase customer loyalty, implement cross-sell and up-sell strategies based on customer relationships, and promote the productivity and satisfaction of sales and service representatives.

Genesys Worldwide Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, is the worlds leading provider of contact center and customer service management software with more than 4,000 customers in 80 countries. Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions every day, dynamically connecting customers with the right resources self-service or assisted-service to fulfill customer requests, optimize customer care goals and efficiently use agent resources. Genesys helps organizations drive contact center efficiency, stop customer frustration and accelerate business innovation. For more information visit: www.genesyslab.com, or call +1 888 GENESYS or 1-650-466-1100.

Americas Corporate Headquarters Genesys 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd. Daly City, CA 94014 USA Tel: +1 650 466 1100 Fax: +1 650 466 1260 E-mail: info@ genesyslab.com www.genesyslab.com

Europe, Middle East, Africa EMEA Headquarters Genesys House Frimley Business Park Frimley Camberley Surrey GU16 7SG United Kingdom Tel: +44 1276 457000

Asia Pacific APAC Headquarters Genesys Laboratories Australasia Pty Ltd Level 17, 124 Walker Street North Sydney NSW 2060 Australia Tel: +61 2 9463 8500 www.genesyslab.com.au

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Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies and are hereby recognized. 2008 Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.