Sears Case Study


Sears: Ten week teleservice turnaround

Value delivered 8 weeks post go live:

  • 14% reduction in idle time
  • 10% increase in agent connects per hour
  • 9% reduction in overall agent call handle time
  • 13% reduction in talk time
The Customer

Sears Holdings Corporation is a bastion of the North American retail sector with approximately £25 billion in annual revenues and approximately 3,800 full-line and speciality retail stores in the United States and Canada. Sears Holdings is the leading home appliance retailer. The Texas based, Sears Home Services Teleservice Outbound operation, is first of thirteen separate departments to undergo a customer experience transformation affecting 6,000 users across multiple inbound, outbound and back office customer interaction channels. This case-study focusses on the first delivery to Sears in the Home Services Outbound operation, which is staffed by approximately 100 agents responsible for scheduling and rescheduling service and repair calls for Sears customers.

The Challenge

The desktop application that the Outbound Teleservice team were operating did not provide agents with a single view of customer contact and case history. The user interface was not intuitive and the application failed to provide agents with the detailed information they required to complete customer interactions efficiently. Agents had to navigate between several legacy applications, which led to an inconsistent customer experience as the effectiveness of the interaction was reliant on the knowledge of the agent. Agent talk times were often lengthy because of the high number of legacy applications that agents had to navigate, which also hindered management's ability to track agent activity.

The Solution

The Sword Ciboodle desktop provides agents with an intuitive and comprehensive interface that eradicates the inefficient use of multiple systems. Sword Ciboodle replaced Sears' former desktop applications and integrates with the Avaya Mosaix Dialer, mainframe applications via MQ, core mainframe customer view web service call and Fed-Ex/UPS parcel tracking web services.

The Results

10 weeks after the Sword Ciboodle team began to whiteboard ideas and process models, the Teleservice Outbound project was live and operational in the contact centre. And within only 8 weeks of going live, Sears recorded a reduction in average call handling time by 13 seconds, resulting in 6 FTE of efficiency savings. Sears Teleservice Outbound operation now has a reliable, integrated application that provides a comprehensive single customer view. This successful completion of this first phase marks the beginning of a huge programme of work that will enable Sears to enhance their overall customer experience.
 
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