Imagine this: you're browsing online for the perfect couch to complete your living room.
You add it to your cart and hit checkout.
The only thing left is waiting for your new furniture to arrive.
But what happens if the delivery is delayed for any reason or if you need to reschedule?
This is where the BJS Home Delivery contact center comes in.
To provide quality service while handling thousands of orders for their customer orders, the company needed a solution to communicate with customers through multiple channels.
Our vision was to elevate the customer experience and head towards omnichannel. Twilio stood out as the best choice when compared to other options. Twilio’s programmability has allowed us to build the exact experience we need for our teams and our customers.
Solving delivery issues is often complex, contact center agents need to review transaction details across several systems and stakeholders to provide the right solution to customers.
One of the reasons that BJS Home Delivery selected Twilio Flex is that it offered them a single pane of glass experience for their agents. The company runs a complex software landscape of about 40 different systems internally. Having all customer information in one place helps agents understand the customer’s intent, provide accurate solutions and save time on calls.
Along with the management team, agents can access an easy-to-understand dashboard to improve their service level agreements (SLAs) in real-time.
Using Twilio Flex allowed the BJS Home Delivery management team to improve monitoring and visibility of agent activity, productivity and utilization. As a result, they reduced the average time to answer inbound customer calls from 25 seconds to 9 seconds. The answering rate for calls from their delivery service agents decreased by 30%-35% (from 90 seconds to under 60 seconds).
The management team could also see how calls are pushed into an agent’s queue, ensure these are balanced, and monitor the number of calls that agents are answering on average. This enabled them to:
- Monitor and score calls based on how agents handled them
- Allocate calls based on the agents skill set
- Confirm that tasks are assigned to the correct agents
- Improve productivity
- Set targets based on call insights
“Twilio made it easier to solve customer issues and improved call handling performance without increasing our team size, despite handling higher volumes of calls,” said Singh.
BJS Home Delivery handles approximately 90,000 calls with Twilio Flex every month. Once outbound calls are moved to Flex, Singh estimates that the number of calls will rise to around 1.3 million per year.
With task management in the pipeline, BJS Home Delivery expects approximately a further 20% reduction in call volume.
More than improving business efficiency, the company seeks to deliver a personalized customer experience. That means having the context of the reason customers are calling.
To achieve this, BJS Home Delivery used Twilio Studio to design their contact center to access key data when receiving an inbound contact. Agents then use this data to understand where their customers are in their buying journey.
Utilizing Twilio Studio, Text To Speech, and Twilio Interactive Voice Response (IVR) features, BJS also designed the IVR to give a dynamic response to every customer. As a result, customers will get IVR responses tailored to them based on the state of their orders.
The company also uses SMS through Twilio Flex to update customers about their orders.
For BJS Home Delivery, transparency is the key to selecting a service provider to handle a large amount of critical customer data.
“When the provider has a great set of documentation and APIs, that tells me they have nothing to hide. They are providing high-quality, well-engineered, thought-out transparent systems,” said Singh.
With Twilio Flex, the team found they have control over their data and flexibility in building the customer experience they want. Singh noted that Twilio Flex allowed them to obfuscate data, choose what to share with Twilio, and be custodians of their data. He added that this is different from plugging in an off-the-shelf solution.
“Twilio has programmability at the heart of the platform. That tells me I can have Twilio evolve with my business as time goes on,” said Singh.
Aside from calls and SMS, email is another high-volume channel for BJS Home Delivery. The engineering team at BJS is looking forward to integrating email, WhatsApp, and video with Flex in the near future.
In terms of a future roadmap with Twilio, BJS Home Delivery is planning to:
Use video for drivers with on-site issues to improve the home delivery experience
Leverage virtual agents, machine learning, and AI to supplement their agent resources
Singh emphasizes the importance of combining strategy with technology.
To create an efficient contact center, you need to establish a vision for the customer and agent experience and work towards it. Twilio provides you with proven tools to help you build that vision. It is up to you what you build with it.