The Customer
The Perfume Shop is the UK’s largest independent perfume and cosmetics retailer. With 200 stores across as many towns and villages—and millions of online customers—it has been a highly visible and trusted brand since it first appeared on the High Street almost 30 years ago. Its mission: to offer each of its valued customers an enjoyable and satisfying shopping experience; to help them choose the ideal gift or perfume from more than 6 000 high-quality products.
The Perfume Shop is the UK’s largest independent perfume and cosmetics retailer. With 200 stores across as many towns and villages—and millions of online customers—it has been a highly visible and trusted brand since it first appeared on the High Street almost 30 years ago. Its mission: to offer each of its valued customers an enjoyable and satisfying shopping experience; to help them choose the ideal gift or perfume from more than 6 000 high-quality products.
Business Challenges
As a recognized brand determined to build on its recent successes in service excellence, The Perfume Shop knew its communications technology needed to better meet the sophisticated demands of the modern consumer. It understood that retail had changed forever and that these changes were closely linked to an increasingly evolving “at your fingertips” shopping culture that voraciously embraces the smartest technologies. With a growing number of time-pressed customers shopping online and by phone, it knew they were looking for a rich, seamless and effortless experience that would keep them coming back. And, with its rapidly expanding sales and service teams working from anywhere in response to the seismic and ongoing shift in consumer behavior, it also knew it needed to connect its multiple communication channels to its mission-critical customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The challenges were numerous and complex. The existing phone solution lacked call queue management and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) features, making the caller experience awkward and unsatisfactory. It also lacked call reporting, preventing historical and real-time analysis of call frequency, volume, duration or quality, which was needed for strategic decision-making, dispute resolution, reputation protection and employee training. Above all, the existing system could not integrate with the company’s CRM platform, which was essential to its marketing, sales and service initiatives and key to turning captured and sorted customer engagement data into revenue.
Sangoma Solutions
Accredited integration partner Tenacity IT worked with The Perfume Shop to fully understand its business model, dependencies, workflows, customer behaviors and communication processes in order to propose a new and innovative approach. Sangoma’s Switchvox as a Service cloud communications platform quickly emerged as the ideal solution. By replicating all the head office’s communication capabilities on any connected device, anytime and anywhere through a single application, it immediately provided rich and powerful unified communications features such as voice, video, IVR and comprehensive call management. Selected users benefited from a personalized dashboard, visual voicemail, a mobile and desktop softphone for calls and chat, call queuing, contact center features, detailed call reporting, conference calling and an auto-attendant; all included as standard. It was also customized to integrate seamlessly with the company’s existing Zendesk CRM platform, an essential part of the new setup. Tenacity IT trained staff to use the new system and supported supervisors in adopting the new dashboards to monitor and distribute calls with maximum efficiency.
Accredited integration partner Tenacity IT worked with The Perfume Shop to fully understand its business model, dependencies, workflows, customer behaviors and communication processes in order to propose a new and innovative approach. Sangoma’s Switchvox as a Service cloud communications platform quickly emerged as the ideal solution. By replicating all the head office’s communication capabilities on any connected device, anytime and anywhere through a single application, it immediately provided rich and powerful unified communications features such as voice, video, IVR and comprehensive call management. Selected users benefited from a personalized dashboard, visual voicemail, a mobile and desktop softphone for calls and chat, call queuing, contact center features, detailed call reporting, conference calling and an auto-attendant; all included as standard. It was also customized to integrate seamlessly with the company’s existing Zendesk CRM platform, an essential part of the new setup. Tenacity IT trained staff to use the new system and supported supervisors in adopting the new dashboards to monitor and distribute calls with maximum efficiency.
The Results
Where an outdated, fragmented phone system ill-suited to the demands of a modern retail environment struggled to meet requirements, a powerful, feature-rich and fully connected communications platform now delivers always-available, enterprise-grade performance. Functionality, flexibility and reliability combine with transformative cost-effectiveness—helping the company win more of those prestigious service awards and supporting its ambitions to increase profitability, grow and succeed.
Where an outdated, fragmented phone system ill-suited to the demands of a modern retail environment struggled to meet requirements, a powerful, feature-rich and fully connected communications platform now delivers always-available, enterprise-grade performance. Functionality, flexibility and reliability combine with transformative cost-effectiveness—helping the company win more of those prestigious service awards and supporting its ambitions to increase profitability, grow and succeed.