%2520(6).jpeg)
The need for businesses to service customers from anywhere, at any time, has been accelerated due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, the retail industry has needed to rapidly pivot from brick-and-mortar stores with supporting e-commerce websites to offer a seamless omnichannel experience that can ebb and flow in line with heightened demand from sales or promotions. With omnichannel buyers having a 30% higher lifetime value than shoppers using only one channel,* It's a trend that Coco Republic did not want to ignore.
Summary
The need for businesses to service customers from anywhere, at any time, has been accelerated due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, the retail industry has needed to rapidly pivot from brick-and-mortar stores with supporting e-commerce websites to offer a seamless omnichannel experience that can ebb and flow in line with heightened demand from sales or promotions. With omnichannel buyers having a 30% higher lifetime value than shoppers using only one channel,* It's a trend that Coco Republic did not want to ignore.
Faced with a complex, legacy contact center infrastructure and an outdated IVR (Interactive Voice Response), Coco Republic needed an agile and scalable solution that would enable them to grow and expand their business. In addition, they needed the flexibility to innovate while delivering a seamless, luxury customer experience, no matter how customers choose to contact them and no matter where their agents are.
Read how Local Measure (now part of Zendesk) and Amazon Connect implemented a cloud contact center solution that provides Coco Republic flexibility of agent location and the technology to innovate at scale.
About Coco Republic
Coco Republic is a leading luxury furniture and design brand. They have operated for over 40 years with the firm belief that a home is a sanctuary and an essential part of achieving a sense of well-being. This belief comes to life through beautiful retail showrooms, Interior Design services, and Property Styling. The customers of Coco Republic appreciate the luxury of the finest craftsmanship, sophisticated attention to detail, ground-breaking innovation and beautiful and sustainable materials. Delivering an exceptional and luxurious Customer Experience is a core focus for Coco Republic due to a very loyal and repeat customer base.
The Challenge - Cost and Inflexibility of Legacy Systems
Facing a period of significant business growth and expansion, IT Operations Manager, Richard Hay, identified an opportunity to migrate several expensive and complex legacy systems to the cloud. Having extensive experience in this area, he knew that they would be costly to maintain and upgrade without a considerable amount of dedicated resources and associated budgets.
In particular, Richard identified that a single point of failure was the legacy phone system for the following reasons:
- An overly complex IVR that wasn't delivering a positive customer experience.
- Inability to know who was calling and why.
The challenge faced with traditional contact center models meant Coco Republic would be locked into a specific number of licenses due to their available budget. In addition, this option would not allow Coco Republic to easily change the IVR, deploy new users, generate basic reports, or innovate without incurring extra costs.
Our legacy systems were clunky, based on site, and were our single point of failure. With Amazon Connect and Local Measure, we feel empowered and confident that we can securely scale and innovate. - Richard Hay, IT Operations Manager
The Solution - Agility to deliver Exceptional Experience at Scale
Coco Republic was introduced to Amazon Connect as a potential solution to their contact center requirements via their AWS Account Manager. Unlike other contact center models, as it uses pay-as-you-go pricing, Coco Republic no longer needed to worry about licensing costs. Only paying for what they use and not wasting any money meant a clean and straightforward entry into a cloud contact center that was completely scalable.
Looking for an agent desktop that would allow greater customer personalization and the opportunity to seamlessly add other communication channels in the future led Richard to Local Measure's Engage solution (now part of Zendesk for Contact Center). Engage perfectly complements Amazon Connect due to its simplicity and consumption-only pricing. Richard also found that Engage was more dynamic and agile than other options available in the market, most focusing on how many licenses they would need, not on what would be best for their business and customer experience now and in the future. In fact, the initial proof of concept was changed to a full implementation within just a week of signing off the solution design.
Simple Procurement & Implementation
The one-click procurement through AWS Marketplace was easy and pain-free for all. It took under a month to go live with a clean and customer-friendly IVR, calls forwarded to the appropriate teams and showrooms, and voicemail to email functionality.
The Local Measure team is extremely professional. They really wanted to understand our business and our needs. They weren't just going to jump in and do what I asked them to do if it wasn't going to be the best solution. They listened, went away, worked on it, brought new ideas, and were quite resourceful, as well. I like that. They brought their own values to the table and were just an absolute joy to work with. - Richard Hay, IT Operations Manager, Coco Republic
The Results
The solution has delivered many benefits for their agents, business, and of course, their customers.
For Agents- Easy, Quick, and Seamless.
- Fun and Easy Onboarding - Completed in just two sessions of 1.5 hours
- On-Demand Customer Service - Agents can log on in minutes via their computer, whether at home or in the office.
- Context and Knowledge- More customer information at their fingertips so that they can respond to requests and solve any issues far quicker than before.
For The Business- Transparency, Agility, and Flexibility
- Quick Time-to-Value - Up and running in 4 weeks.
- Cost Transparency - The business can now easily identify the actual cost of issues and pay only for what they use.
- Agility to scale as required - As customer needs and calls increase, so can the response, meaning that they can go from 5 to 30 customer service agents at any time, for example if there’s a promotion or sale event that increases demand.
For Customers - Exceptional Service on their terms
- Personalized Service - The joy of speaking to someone who knows them and their purchase and service history without explaining everything time and time again.
- An end to on-hold - Request a call back so that they aren't wasting time.
- Seamless Connection - Always land in the right place to answer their query with call transfers to the retail showrooms.
Before we implemented Engage, we were often a bit slower to respond to our clients and didn't have the context that we would have liked . Now we have the tools at our disposal to deliver the experience expected of a luxury brand. - Leveice Reynolds, 2IC Retail Operations
A Bright Future
Having traded and expanded through the global pandemic of 2020/2021, Coco Republic is now looking towards a bright future. The ability to grow and scale without upgrading large legacy systems or servers means they won't have to worry about cost blow-outs due to purchasing contact center seat licenses that they may not use.
And as Coco Republic evolves, so will their customers, but that's ok because whenever they need to, they can quickly and seamlessly add more channels through which their customers can contact them when required.
AWS Services Used In The Solution
- Amazon Connect
- Amazon Serverless Wallboard
- Amazon Simple Email Service
- Amazon Customer Profiles
- AWS Dynamo DB Tables
- AWS Lambda Functions
