If you’re in the highly-competitive, low margin parts business, your customer service had better be good -- otherwise your customers are going to quickly flock to your competitors.
Up until a couple of years ago, Cycle Gear Inc., which sells motorcycle parts, apparel, and accessories for sport bike, street bike, cruiser, motocross and off road motorcycles and ATVs, was using traditional phone technology in its contact center located at its headquarters in Benicia, Calif.
Due to the inadequacies of its phone system, the company was experiencing an unacceptable rate of missed and unreturned calls. As a result, company management decided it needed a new, IP-based contact center system -- including an IVR system to more effectively route calls to its six customer service representatives, as well as to enable customers to leave voice messages if no rep is available.
The company also wanted a contact center system with good reporting – as well as call monitoring so that supervisors could listen to agent interactions and intervene on calls if needed.
Cycle Gear found what it wanted in Contactual’s (News - Alert) software-as-a-service-based contact center software. The on-demand software is fast and simple to deploy; requires minimal up-front cost compared to on-premises solutions; and offers a full range of contact center applications including IP-PBX (News - Alert), ACD, IVR, call monitoring/recording, customer surveys and out-of-the-box reporting.
“We chose Contactual, with its excellent Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, to help us deliver better customer service,” said Brandon Finch, director of Cycle Gear Direct, in a case study posted on Contactual’s website. “By switching to Contactual, we took a big leap forward in efficiency in handling customer calls. Our missed call rate has dropped significantly.”
Finch said the IVR has improved call handling and service level maintenance.
“With the Contactual IVR, the number of calls we miss has dwindled, if not disappeared entirely,” he said. “You could say we took a big leap forward in efficiency. With Contactual, we can maintain a level of service for our customers that is top notch.”
Finch said the company also uses Contactual’s call monitoring “extensively to listen in to what a customer service rep is dealing with, so we get both sides of the rep/caller conversation.”
In addition contact center supervisors use the platform’s instant messaging feature to “coach the reps along through customer calls … so, while reps are fielding customers’ questions that are slightly outside their normal purview, supervisors can do research to find the answers to these tough questions, and then share that information with the reps through IM.”
“With Contactual and IM, our customers get their questions answered right away and seamlessly,” Finch added.
In addition, Contactual’s managed service is backed up by excellent support and customer service.
“We’re very happy with Contactual’s customer service,” said Paul Flores, director of operations. “It’s excellent. Everybody at Contactual is responsive when there is an issue and downtime seems to be minimized.”
“And Contactual is easy to use,” added Finch. “When new Cycle Gear Direct customer service reps are coming aboard, it only requires a very minimal amount of effort to set them up and show them how to use Contactual.”
To learn more about Contactual’s on-demand contact center software, click here.
To read the case study about Cycle Gear, click here.
Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Patrick Barnard