Home Retail Group Rolls Out VoiceSage Across 3 UK Contact Centres

Parent group of Argos, Homebase and Habitat boosts the customer experience with proactive automated delivery notifications and uses agents more efficiently.

Home Retail Group, whose brands include Argos, Homebase and Habitat, has implemented a hosted interactive voice messaging (IVM) and SMS solution from VoiceSage. This is being used by its Customer and Financial Services organisation which handles some 10 million inbound calls a year and 2 million order and delivery email enquiries, and employs 1,800 staff across three contact centres.

Home Retail Group wanted to be able to pre-empt routine customer order and delivery queries with proactive outbound messages, to boost the customer experience while making its own operations more efficient and cost-effective. Before adopting VoiceSage, agents would call customers to confirm order delivery dates and times. Using a dialler, they were typically achieving only a 30-40% success rate in getting through to people.

Within four weeks of using VoiceSage’s solutions to automate its customer contact communications, by sending a combination of text messages and pre-recorded voice messages, Home Retail Group reported it had achieved the same number of customer contacts per hour as through the dialler system – but with a significantly higher hit rate. It has also been able to reduce the amount of agents time that is tied up in delivery contact activities. Telephony costs have significantly decreased too, as 60% of contacts are now made via SMS.

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