Even organisations that might not regard themselves as “digital first” are recognising that they need to be where their customers are, and that might no longer be on the other end of a landline.

Take UK and Europe-wide company Euro Car Parts — owned by the LKQ Corporation — which is something of a sleeping giant. The firm now boasts more than 330 branches and stocks over 160,000 distinct parts for automobiles.

The spare parts firm’s purpose-built 1 million sq ft national distribution centre in Tamworth, UK, is second only in size to Amazon’s warehouses. And yet, as head of sales excellence Chole Thomson explains: “Unless you’ve ordered a spare part from us, you’ve probably never heard of us!”

Given the size and scale of Euro Car Parts, it’s surprising to learn that, until recently, its sales offices relied on an old, end-of-life telephony system. Phone desks were still ringing constantly, but these were increasingly supplemented by WhatsApp messages between sales team members using their personal devices and customers.

According to Thomson, the firm recognised the need to bring these customer interactions back in-house and to save valuable data so that they could build up a better profile of these customers and their preferences.

WhatsApp: “There cannot be a British Internet” — Read the article here.

Euro Car Parts turned to customer experience vendor Genesys to integrate voice notes, WhatsApp, and other digital channels to meet these new generational customers’ expectations.

For Thomson, another advantage of using Genesys’ cloud-based orchestration system was getting a heads-up on incoming calls.

“Our old school way of doing things was to memorise the incoming phone number that came up on the screen so that you’d know ‘that is Sandra!’

“But knowing that a call is coming from ‘Bob’s Garage’ and immediately being able to see the customer’s likes/dislikes brand-wise is helpful,” Thomson enthuses.

The new system was installed in February and has now launched in England, Scotland, and Wales. Genesys and WhatsApp were fully deployed by mid-May, and according to Thomson, Euro Car Parts is now dealing with over 500 brand new WhatsApp conversations every day; a figure that, she adds, is growing “week-on-week”.

Genesys and Lighthouse Works partner to boost CX careers for blind workers

Data dive

One of the big business benefits of moving to the new system has been the amount of data the company has been able to gather on its customers and internal processes, according to Thomson.

It is currently in the process of pulling in the latest info it has gained from Genesys so that it can apply this data in meaningful ways.

“We’ve never had as much data as we do now,” she says. “We don’t have any more blind spots. We can see everything. We can now analyse the peaks and troughs of the different queries we receive as well as the different sales that are coming in. So, we can enhance that journey and look at what’s working and not working for our sales teams.”

In terms of the WhatsApp integration, Thomson explains that a typical interaction might include a customer taking a picture of a registration plate, and requesting some brake pads or a clutch and flywheel.

“The sales advisor will order that part but now they will be able to look at what those customer preferences are and add any weekly specials that we might have on brake fluid, for instance,” she says.

She adds that while Euro Car Parts comprises of sales offices, rather than contact centres, the firm is looking closely at this model and its customer journeys.

“We’re currently looking at what CX centres do well, looking at the customer journey and are learning how we bring that into our world,” she says.

AI capabilities

According to Thomson, the next step for Euro Car Parts is to integrate AI and gamification into its new orchestration system.

“We’re excited about using AI for data mining and sentiment analysis to understand what our customers want,” she says.

“AI will let us know things like whether we’ve already set up a promotion for a weekly deal that we’ve already offered before, five times. Or finding out whether there’s a tool on offer that they want. We want to use that information and give the customer what they want.”

Gamification, she adds, will also help celebrate the performance of the company’s sales teams, by giving managers a clear view of who the top performers are.

“In the past it was a bit more unpredictable – someone could just have sold one expensive part. Now we can see who has really been working hard on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It will certainly make them more competitive!”

• Chloe Thomson spoke with TechInformed at Genesys Xperience UKI tour 2024 in June at the Truman Brewery in East London. Live event photography by Nick Beard

The post Driving sales for a new generation appeared first on TechInformed.

It’s a challenge that police forces have been looking to address, according to Rob Brind, a digital silver commander (a senior officer in the force’s Gold-Silver-Bronze command hierarchy) at Hampshire & Isle of White Constabulary, and Thames Valley Police.

“We’re able to maintain our emergency 999 call answer times, but we’d got to the point where our non-emergency 101 call rates were taking, on average, seven minutes to answer,” says Brind.

“To just handle a call now takes longer. Most crimes are digitally enabled, be they phishing scams or a stalking harassment case via social media…All this increased complexity of gathering information is usually done by the call handler, which has seen the number of calls drop from four-to-five an hour to two-to-three,” he explains.

Brind found that half of all calls coming into the police were incident descriptions after conducting analysis of the types of non-emergency demand that was coming in.  Another 20% of demand was from callers looking for updates on reported crimes, while an additional 30% of calls were harder to predict.

“In these cases, we don’t really know what the demand looks like,” Brind admits.

According to the commander, tackling the 20% of people calling in for updates was critical – as this was the category which police could anticipate and therefore cater for more efficiently using automated technologies.

“We were looking for something that could either push automated messages to these victims of crime who were looking for updates or allow them to access messages or policing services in a different way that would keep them informed and engaged,” Brind explains.

After looking at a range of technologies that could assist the force in sensitively automating a crime victim’s journey, the force chose Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud solution.

“This allowed us to create a journey, and send automated messages, text messages or emails to those victims over a period of the crime lifecycle so. So, info about the crime number, the officer assigned to the case and crime prevention advice.

“Now, instead of the victim having to call us they’re getting that info straight away over a period of time. This information is coming either from our contact management system or our record management system.”

Messaging portal

Since the force went live with the system last August, Brind says that the system has sent over 400,000 messages to victims of crime.

Thames Valley Police also worked with Salesforce to build a portal where victims can self-serve information and monitor the progress of the investigation.

“On the portal, there’s a chevron at the top that tells you what status your crime is at. Whether it’s being investigated, or whether stuff is out for forensics etc”

“We’ve also built a two-way messaging service between officers and members of the public. So instead of victims of crime having to phone up for an update or wait for the officer to contact them, they can now contact the officer and the officer can message back through the portal,” Brind explains.

Following the portal’s launch in February, it has already exchanged 8,000 messages between officers and members of the public. “We’ve also seen over 40,000 people access the portal over that period as well,” Brind adds.

The portal has also been designed to host useful information: from victim code of compliance; knowledge articles complied by the Home Office around support services; as well as a list of NGOs and specialists that victims of crime can speak with.

Brind estimates that since the technology was installed there has been a call reduction of 30,000 across Hampshire and Thames Valley in the last quarter.

“That’s a significant number of calls reduced. If that continues that’s 120,000 calls reduced to call centres which allows us to focus on other areas of demand – people who are victims or witnesses of crime and recording it and dealing with that in a timely manner.”

Brind adds that speed-to-answer times have reduced from seven minutes to three-to-four minutes over the last month or so. He enthuses: “We are giving members of the public a more efficient service because they are getting updates in a timelier way, and they are getting a choice now of how they get updated on what’s happening.”

The commander admits that not all sections of the public likes automated messages, but the aim is to address a significant portion of the demand.

“Around 90% of people are quite happy being pushed info, another 9% will want to self-serve because they need further info.  And 1% will always want to call up and ask for more. If we can tackle a portion of that 90%, we are halfway there to dealing with a much better service,” he says.

Roadmap

Of course, there are more things on the list. The automated service does not yet work in other languages, but Brind adds “AI is getting better at doing that” and he’s hopeful that this is something they can add soon.

The force would also like to extend its automated service to other parts of the law enforcement system such as witness care.

“There’s an attrition rate of victims and witnesses not going to court because they haven’t been updated. Post-Covid those waits are longer because there’s a backlog in the courts.

“So, how do we deal with those witnesses and people better, so we get those cases to court? Pushing info or self-serving on a portal could support this process better,” he says.

Another challenge the force would like to address is the 30% of calls which are harder to predict. These are calls that neither fall under the category of ‘crime’ or ‘incident’ but might be related to healthcare, mental health services or the local authorities.

“Over the next 12 months, we want to look at how to get better at diverting those calls away from 101 to the right person at the right time.”

Thames Valley Police is currently working with AI-powered speech analytics software company Sprinklr to address this challenge and create a chatbot that can deal with multiple calls at any one time.

Brind is also looking at how the banking sector uses AI-powered bots, like NatWest’s Cora, to see how it can be applied to policing.

The commander adds that these bots would also help with crime reports made online.

Bots for cops

“We use robotics to process crime reports and that info goes into our record management system. But those that can’t be processed by a robot need to be done manually. So how do we automate that process going forward? In a way using AI and running AI over the top…”

While budgets are tight, TI asks Brind what he’d like to do if he had a larger budget. Like many organisations, he replies that in an increasingly AI-driven world, a deep data cleanse would benefit the force.

He explains that much of the force’s data has been moved to a Microsoft Azure cloud, but tasks like sorting out structured data from unstructured data and releasing siloed data so that crime reports, can be brought together with contact data or HR data would be “hugely powerful”.

He adds: “I’d like to see greater investment in being able to pull together our data: how we cleanse it; use it to inform our long-, medium- and short-term decision-making.

“The vast majority of our budgets go on people so our expenditure on digital and technology is limited. But it would be great to bring together our datasets and our partnership data sets, bring that together and use it to inform our decision making.”

“That sounds simplistic but that’s all we want to do in police – be a bit more proactive around making sure we’ve got the right resources in the right teams with the right skills to do what we need to do in the future.”

The post Force for good: how CX automation is improving police response times appeared first on TechInformed.

According to the deputy service manager at Refuge’s contact centre, Ellen Patterson, the charity’s network of employees and volunteers delivers 147 support sessions every day.

“Around 70% of the people we speak to are survivors of domestic abuse,” Patterson explains, “and 10% are from third parties – friends and neighbours etc and another 10% are from professionals from a variety of sectors who are usually looking to make a referral. Around 139 referrals are made to Refuge each week.”

In 2019 the UK government’s Home Office awarded Refuge the contract to run the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline as its sole provider – a role it had previously jointly run with allied charity Women’s Aid.

As well as the initial four-year £1.2m contract, Refuge secured additional funding to develop new digital and mobile resources to support survivors. This led to the introduction of a live chat service in 2020 and an improved email support service, which now sees the team make 430 supportive emails per month.

During this period, Refuge also introduced a dedicated referral line, so that women can enquire specifically about refuge vacancies, as well as a BSL interpreter line.

According to Patterson, while the extra platforms were a welcome addition, it did lead to a bolt-on approach in terms of networking infrastructure. Legacy systems included a disparate collection of separate applications which provided telephony, chat and reporting, including Horizon Collaborate and ResourceConnect.

“Just because of the capacity within our team and the funds that we had available, all of these things had been kind of tacked on as we’ve gone along,” she recalls.

“We got to a situation where all these platforms became quite difficult to manage, it was taking time to navigate each platform for each different part of our service – both from a management perspective but also for the helpline advisers,” she adds.

The time taken to manage the navigation of this set-up, remembering the different logins for different platforms etc, was also taking away from time supporting survivors and it prompted the charity to consider a contact centre solution capable of “bringing everything into one place.”

Another reason to switch to a cloud-based comms system was the need to cater for remote workers: during and after the pandemic Refuge staff and volunteers had transitioned from a central contact centre in London, to working remotely or hybrid, from anywhere in the country.

“We largely work remotely now, and it’s good to be able to draw from a wider pool of experienced people – but managing this can be challenging,” says Patterson.

“Workers need a dedicated space where no one else can hear, no one can come into the room, it’s confidential. The technology needs to be reliable in terms of sound deadening and ensure that the line is clear – it’s important that someone on the other end of the phone who is in a really difficult situation trusts that this line is secure and can hear you properly.”

Another requirement was to be able to keep the continuity of the number: 0808 2000 247, as Patterson explains. “Even when the contract changed, and Women’s Aid ceased to be involved the number has stayed the same. Some people commit it to memory so it was important that it couldn’t change.”

Cloud-based CX

Refuge selected Genesys Cloud CX platform, powered by AWS Cloud, which offers a full range of contact centre capabilities for remote and on-prem workers from a single platform.

Explaining why Genesys won the contract over other providers at the CX orchestration vendor’s London customer event Xperience last month, Patterson explained that, at first, they thought that the technology was beyond their budget.

“It was clear that we had champagne tastes on a beer budget! Fortunately for us (and for the survivors we support) Genesys made it possible for us to close that gap.”

She added that the fact Genesys made the effort to speak their language was also important. “It may not seem that significant but the difference between referring to our service users as ‘customers’, or even ‘victims’, instead of the survivors we know them to be was very important to us.”

Refuge’s internal team worked closely with the Genesys professional services team to implement the helpline on the platform, which the charity reports has been “highly configurable”, with “a minimum of software development needed.”

Patterson adds that staff training took place over a couple of weeks, with no real issues in terms of user take-up.  “Our team are incredible and do a difficult job, some of them for over 20 years. So, while it is easy to get ingrained in the process that we had and there was some anxiety around learning to use a new system, as soon as they start using it, they found it intuitive and not scary at all.”

Visibility

According to Patterson, there are several advantages to moving to a cloud-based contact centre system including the additional visibility of being able to see instantly how many callers are waiting and where they are calling in from.

“If a call drops while we’re speaking to a survivor, for whatever reason, we want to make sure that we can get the number back to call them (unless they’ve withheld their number) and that’s easier now we can see the customer journey.”

Managing the flow of calls and the type of calls better also has benefits for helpline staff and their managers too, says Patterson.

“We’re now able to create different pots of callers because the new system gives us more visibility as to who is calling and from where and how long they’ve been waiting.”

She adds that if a support service worker is on their last ten minutes it might not be the right time to take a call from a survivor calling in for the first time; but it may be long enough to take a call from a professional looking to make a referral.

“We can also now see if a member of staff has been on three days of taking phones every single day – which can be exhausting –  as a manager I can now make that decision to give them a break by moving them onto one of our written platforms,” she adds.

The system is also better able to deal with language barriers. The previous system did not allow Refuge to take three-way calls, and non-English-speaking survivors were referred to an interpreter service. “We would have to give them the survivors’ number – but that function now sits with us. And we hold all the data ourselves,” Patterson explains.

The system has been live now for just over a month and Patterson says that it is on track to increase the number of interactions it has with service users by as much as 30 to 40%. “That’s 300 or 400 more survivors a week being supported as a result,” she adds.

An eye on AI

Now Patteson says that the Refuge team is firmly focussed on consolidating its implementation although it is looking at a range of future AI-enabled possibilities, that it hopes to embrace eventually.

In the US,  the National Domestic Violence Hotline – another Genesys Cloud user – is using selective, survivor-centric AI support to keep pace with a threefold increase in daily calls, chats and text.

Survivors phoning in have the option of providing a voice bot with non-identifiable demographic data and the outcomes they want to get out of the conversation, taking care to use their words and language. That information is then presented on screen when the call is routed to help prepare the support worker.

For Patterson, these sorts of applications are a little further down Refuge’s roadmap  “We’re a little bit nervous about using AI – the inherent biases of those who write the data, build on that and learn. But when we first started talking to Genesys and the things it has on the roadmap for the future – then to not consider AI would be a disservice to our users

“It’s a big thing to pick up the phone, for instance, and speak to someone about something so personal and it may be that AI can help them get a little bit of info first to understand what their options and avenues are before they feel ready to speak to a person. We never want AI to replace that human interaction, but I can see a place for it.”

The post Refuge’s contact centre moves to the cloud appeared first on TechInformed.