Mr Price Group has deployed the Interactive Intelligence customer engagement software suite, Customer Interaction Centre™, at its 621-seat contact centre in Durban, and at its 30-seat contact centre also in Durban.
CIC has revolutionised the contact centre’s operations and delivered a return on investment in only six months, according to Colin Salvesen, omnichannel executive at MRP Money, a division of Mr Price Group.

“Within six months we saw improved efficiencies, a better customer experience, increased sales and significant savings,” Salvesen said. “In major outgoing direct campaigns alone, our contact centre is able to support the marketing division and help save millions in postage and marketing materials, while at the same time increasing the success rate of each campaign.”

Salvesen elaborated on how CIC has improved the customer experience. “CIC has given us a unified, view of the customer across an omnichannel environment, which has helped us better upsell and cross sell, and made it easier for customers to engage with us,” he said. “Agents now get contextual information about the customer so they can make a warm transfer when appropriate to another agent who can offer additional products and services, such as financial services or mobile offers. Customers can also now choose when they want a follow-up call, which improves both their experience and our sales success.”

Mr Price Group replaced a multitude of communications systems with CIC in order to keep pace with growth and customer service demands across channels, such as voice, email, messaging and other digital channels. “Our previous disparate systems were seven years old and based on legacy architecture, which meant our contact centres were siloed across service offerings,” Salvesen said. “We needed an advanced, unified platform that would support a single view of the customer across a multichannel, multiproduct environment, while increasing efficiencies and enabling us to be more agile.

Mr Price Group deployed CIC without any downtime. Roll-out and integration was achieved within five weeks, and users were quick to learn the new system, according to Salvesen. “Because CIC is exceptionally user-friendly and integrates with existing systems, our contact centre agents required minimal training. They also saw their own productivity increase as a result of CIC, and with commissions tied to productivity, this has increased both their performance and morale.”

Today, Mr Price Group uses the full breadth of CIC applications, including interactive voice response, auto attendant, skills-based and multichannel routing, computer telephony integration, screen pop, reporting, multichannel recording and desktop faxing.
 
Mr Price Group has also integrated CIC with six different CRM systems and a Zendesk ticketing platform. It will also be integrated with a Qlikview BI visualisation tool and an expanded customer service system to include in-store mobile and kiosk-based applications. Future plans also include CIC’s Web callback and social media monitoring functionality.
 
“It’s impressive to see how Mr Price Group has used CIC to position its contact centre as a digital hub for both customer and employee engagement,” said Andre Le Roux, Interactive Intelligence managing director, African region. “This is an incredibly forward-looking team with an innovative customer service vision that continues to evolve.

One initiative underway is to more closely integrate the customer’s experience at physical stores with the overall brand experience across digital channels using the contact centre as the hub. This is just one example of how Mr Price Group is using CIC to reinvent the customer experience -- and by doing so, reinvent itself to stay competitive in this age of digital disruption.”