Avaya Customer Engagement Enables Growth for Leading UK Design Firm

Gtech Can Now Provide Industry-leading Customer Service Thanks to Deployment of Avaya Contact Centre

Headquartered in the UK, Gtech is the brainchild of CEO and design innovator Nick Grey, who holds the distinction of having developed the world’s first cordless power sweeper. The company designs and manufactures cordless products including vacuum cleaners, garden power tools, lawnmowers and an electric bike. This fast-growing design firm employs more than 100 people in three different countries and has sold more than 22 million products.

“Our company vision is to become the best loved floor-care brand in the world,” explains CEO Nick Grey.

And to accomplish that, he knows he has to offer the best customer service in the industry. “We’ve grown a lot, we’re 20 times bigger than we were four years ago, and that brings all kinds of issues,” he says. “We have lots of phone calls coming in, lots of transactions, so everything has to have a system and a process. It’s more than just a matter of hiring dutiful people that really want to do a good job. You have to give them good tools and a good organization.”

In order to equip his employees with the tools they needed, Gtech deployed Avaya Contact Center Select (ACCS). Today, Gtech employees have a reliable, multichannel contact centre solution that provides them with up-to-the-minute statistics, allowing them to offer very best customer service.

Understanding the Customer Experience

“Everyone seems to be selling direct these days, so it’s very important that we give the best service. If someone else is giving better service, customers will probably go there,” says the Gtech CEO.

Key to offering the best service is an in-depth understanding of customer engagement and, as David Bates, IT manager at Gtech explains, that was sorely lacking with the previous contact center solution.

“The driver for change was essentially the fact that we weren’t getting any sort of statistics from our existing system,” he says. “Now, with real time reports, we’re not spending weeks looking at historical reports to try to forecast. We’re able to say ‘this is real time, this is what’s happening,’ and we can deliver results immediately.”

Gtech was able to quickly deploy its 57-seat IP Avaya Contact Center Select (ACCS) without any customer disruption. “Avaya surpassed my expectations, I thought it would take months to implement the solution, but we were up and running in a matter of weeks,” says CEO Nick Grey. “Avaya very quickly delivered what has always been on the top of the list — helping the customer service team give the best service.”

Gtech did look at contact centre solutions from other vendors, but in the end, Avaya’s outstanding customer service and its multichannel experience sold the solution. “The Avaya multichannel capability is a huge benefit for our customers,” says David. “They’re able to utilize multiple channels to get in touch with us, it makes us more available to them and it’s easier for them to reach us. We now have one single solution that allows us to easily communicate with our customers on a daily basis.”

Gtech has been extremely pleased with the Avaya deployment. “Avaya definitely met our expectations,” remarks David. “The product gives us exactly what we want and it’s changed our business in a big way.” 

Gtech Customer Service Director, Chris Plank, who was an integral part of the Avaya contact centre deployment, sums up the benefits of the new solution. “Avaya has helped us gain control over our contact centre, it’s turned what was a Gtech customer service office into a modern contact centre operation,” he says. “It’s helped us provide better coaching for our advisors and make things more standardized so customers don’t feel variations in the level of service we provide.”

Growing Market Share

Gtech and its customers are benefiting from the Avaya contact centre solution on many levels. Nick Grey credits the roll out of the system with increasing the company’s market share.

“The Avaya solution has definitely helped us grow market share,” he says. “ When you sell direct to the end consumer you just can’t grow unless you can process lots of transactions and facilitate positive customer interactions. We couldn’t have grown without improving our systems — and Avaya was a big part of that.”

Gtech’s management team estimates that it can now handle ten times the amount of customer calls and emails that it could in the past. And in a year’s time, agent productivity has improved by 19% and agent idle time has decreased 31%.

From an IT management perspective, the ease of administering the solution and its ability to effectively meet the company’s needs are top benefits.

“The Avaya solution has made my life a lot easier,” he comments.

From a customer perspective, service has improved dramatically, with customer call backs being reduced by 75% and external call routing dropping by 63%. In addition, it used to take up to 48 hours to answer customer emails, and now turn around is between one-to-four hours, and sometimes even shorter.

“The Avaya solution has made the customer-advisor interaction more effective and more efficient,” observes Nick Grey. “For the end customer, the result is getting to talk to the right person at the point that they want to.”

A Trusted Partner

Given the positive experience handling voice, email and web chat interactions with its Avaya Contact Center Select platform, Gtech looks forward to incorporating social media interactions as part of its Avaya multichannel strategy going forward.

“I see us staying with Avaya and continuing to grow with them,” comments David Bates.

Gtech plans to add another 36 agents and an additional supervisor by midyear.

“I now feel that we have a controlled customer experience and customer environment,” says Chris Plank. “With Avaya, my operation runs both effectively and efficiently.”