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Laithwaites Wine People looks to Cloud in customer service project

Six week rollout forms part of the move to a new customer service centre

Laithwaites Wine People has looked to the Cloud to improve its call centre operations, rolling out a public Cloud offering across its new 35 seat customer service centre in Sydney.

The company, which sells premium wine to some 65,000 Australian customers, was looking for a technology driven strategy to interact with its customer base, and decided to deploy IPscape across the business.

Customer service manager, John Matthews, said the rollout of IPscape was about cost efficiency and creating a positive relationship with customers across the business.

“When we first came to Australia, we used the services of an outsourced call centre, and it was a cost efficient thing for us to do at the time,” Matthews said.

“As the years went on, as we grew and as we had a greater requirement for more advisers, we decided that we wanted to bring our call centres in-house and make it at the heart of what we do.”

Take a look at our Q&A with Leon Dale, Asia-Pacific operations director at Laithwaites Wine People

After looking at a number of different vendors, Matthews said he chose to deploy with IPscape because the vendor was easy to understand, and presented information in a simple way.

“We are able to service all our needs ourselves and very easily load lists to our dialers and we don’t need to get in line for the IT team to do this,” he said.

“The user friendly nature of the solution has allowed us to get to grips with it very easily and there have been minimal issues we’ve had to overcome during the process.”

Matthews said despite having concerns about moving away from outsourcing, the company didn’t lose any functionality in the switch.

“One of the things we were worried about when we moved to an in-house solution, we thought we’d lose some functionality like core reporting and an efficient dialer that we had with our outsourced arrangement,” he said.

“When customer service was outsourced, we were losing some functionality and it was very difficult to get multiple reports and stats.”

After deploying IPscape six weeks ago, Laithwaites Wine People said the rollout was so successful that it will now act as a global trial for its business units in the UK, USA and Hong Kong.

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