QVC Keeps Customers Informed About Deliveries with Proactive Customer Contact Solution
The home shopping giant reports that the automated outbound communications solution has paid for itself in savings on stationery and postage alone
VoiceSage, the company that enables automated real-time customer conversations, has announcedthat home-shopping giant QVC has deployed an automated outbound messaging from VoiceSage to keep UK customers updated on the status of deliveries. It claims the solution has paid for itself in savings on stationery and postage alone.
QVC is a leading multichannel retailer, best known for its TV home shopping channels. Its services reach 24 million homes in the UK. The company’s customer operations centre is the largest private sector employer in Knowsley, Liverpool.
Previously the centre relied on a combination of calls, emails and letters by post to notify customers of any delays in the shipment of goods, an activity which accounts for 70,000 outbound messages each month. Creating the content was time-consuming and incurred delays. Generating outbound customer communications in response to a new event such as extreme weather could take 2-3 days, meaning that customers did not always receive timely information.
To increase efficiency QVC has implemented an Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM) and text (SMS) messaging solution from VoiceSage. The system is hosted in the cloud, yet can be controlled directly by the customer services team which can now broadcast personalised voice messages to customers’ home phones or mobiles, or text messages to their mobiles, alerting them in plenty of time if there is an issue with their order. VoiceSage and QVC have also developed standardised templates, allowing customer services staff to generate and distribute new outbound messages in just 3-4 hours, a fraction of the time taken before.
QVC estimates that just removing the cost of stationery and postage used for mail-outs is more than covering the cost of the VoiceSage solution, which is saving the business £64,000 a year. Just as importantly, it has improved customer satisfaction.
More recently QVC has begun using the VoiceSage IVM and SMS solution to confirm receipt of returned goods, averting 20,000 inbound calls a year and increasing customer confidence. Itis also looking at deploying VoiceSage in additional ways, for example in marketing and in payment collections. Management information generated by the systems offer QVC the chance to monitor its operations more closely, identifying call trends, which could be useful to the business too.
Commenting on the QVC’s reasons for selecting VoiceSage, James Keegan, the company’s Director of Customer Services in the UK, says, “With VoiceSage we have created a strong partnership; they were able to guide us to the appropriate solution for what we wanted to achieve. They are very agile as an organisation too: if we need something urgently, they have the flexibility to turn around a solution promptly. As well as being more efficient and making significant savings, VoiceSage has enabled us to provide a more engaging and responsive service to customers, leading to greater trust in our brand.”
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