CUSTOMER PROFILE
ABOUT WINE COUNTRY GIFT BASKETS
Receiving a gift basket filled with special items like wine, cheese or chocolates from Wine Country Gift Baskets is a memorable occasion. The company has manufactured and sold high-quality food and wine baskets to consumers and businesses for over 30 years.
The company’s goal is to ensure recipients enjoy their gifts while building long-lasting customer relationships. It fulfills that mission by making its employees a priority which, in turn, fosters positive customer experiences. Wine Country Gift Baskets is a highly seasonal business that experiences a dramatic jump in interactions during the holiday months of November and December. During that time, its contact center team grows from 30 to 700 agents, who handle 460,000 interactions annually by phone, email and chat.
THE CHALLENGE
The company faces unique business challenges due to dramatic fluctuations in its interaction volume. Starting in November, it hires and trains around 700 temporary employees. However, its mix of outdated, disparate contact center solutions made it difficult to cross-train agents on different systems, which negatively impacted customer service and created inefficiencies.
“Our old environment’s backbone was a 1990s PBX phone system that was nearing the end of its life,” explains Andy Bocko, Director of Enterprise Technology. “We also used an Avaya system that was ending support for the CS1000 and different solutions for quality management, workforce management, chat and email.”
“With Avaya, we had to run multiple reports to get information on important metrics,” explains Jeff Fawcett, Call Center and Training Manager. “It was time-consuming, and the data was often inaccurate.”
Additionally, the company’s on-premises systems and telecom solution were very expensive. “Since we have enormous call spikes during the holidays, we were forced to buy excess telecom capacity— even for the rest of the year when our volumes are much lower,” says Andy. “We also spent a lot of time and money maintaining the on-premises hardware.”
THE SOLUTION
Wine Country Gift Baskets started the search for a new solution that reduced costs while integrating chat, email, workforce management and quality management into a single system.
Initially, the team didn’t consider the cloud. “After evaluating on-premises solutions, we decided to assess cloud solutions,” says Andy. “It came down to Genesys and NiCE CXone. Our users preferred CXone’s interface, so that was a big reason we selected it.”
“The NiCE CXone sales team was also a lot more responsive and prepared,” says Jeff. “It felt like they understood our needs better, which gave me comfort.”
OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED
Significant impact on labor and costs
A major benefit of moving to NiCE CXone was unexpected: Business continuity in a crisis. As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded in the early months of 2020, the company’s new-found capabilities enabled it to have agents work at home and continue serving customers without missing a beat.
“Things are going well, all things considered,” says Jeff Fawcett, Call Center and Training Manager.
“Most of us are working from home now. Thank goodness we have NiCE CXone right now or we wouldn’t be able to have people at home.”
Wine Country Gift Baskets also realized a number of other benefits, including an immediate and dramatic reduction in costs. “We’re saving a whole lot of money with CXone, and our executive team is very happy,” says Andy. “Our recent fourth quarter budget was reduced 10%.”
The company found opportunities for savings in its labor costs, especially those in the busy holiday season. “We monitor call quality very closely,” says Jeff. “The quality management team reviews at least two to three calls per agent. With our old quality solution, they could only review calls as they came in—there were no recording capabilities. It was very labor-intensive and time-consuming. As a result, we needed a large quality team in order to review all of the seasonal agents’ calls.”
“With CXone Quality Management, calls are now recorded so they can be reviewed at any time. It’s enabled us to reduce our seasonal QM team by 70% and reassign them to different positions,” says Jeff.
There were additional labor savings in reducing the number of temporary employees hired. “We used to have two teams of agents handling different types of interactions. With CXone, we cross-trained all agents to handle every type of interaction, which reduced our seasonal workforce by 10%,” says Jeff.
“That might not seem like a large reduction,” continues Jeff, “but reducing a 700-agent workforce by 10% yields big cost savings.”
Additionally, because CXone is so intuitive, agent training time fell by 20%. “If new agents come in on Monday, they can start taking calls on Friday— no problem,” says Jeff.
Agents have enthusiastically embraced CXone. “We conduct surveys with our seasonal employees, and CXone topped the list of changes they felt were real improvements. They immediately accepted and adopted CXone,” says Jeff.
Big cost savings for hardware and telecom expenses
The other major costs savings have been in IT and telecom expenses. “We’ve saved a lot of money on the IT labor side,” says Andy. “Since CXone runs in the cloud, we no longer need to babysit the system like we did with our old on-premises solutions.”
Expensive hardware costs also fell. “Eliminating disparate solutions and server hardware was a game-changer,” says Andy. “All the functionality, such as chat, email, quality management and workforce management, are integrated into the CXone platform, which eliminates paying for individual solutions. We also no longer need to buy or maintain hardware.”
Telecom expenses have fallen dramatically. “Because we’re a seasonal business, we previously had to buy enough telecom capacity to cover our high holiday volumes, and we were forced to maintain those same 600 channels during our slower times. Paying for that excess capacity was very expensive,” says Andy.
“With CXone Voice as a Service, we just pay for what we use. Our telecom expenses fell a whopping 98%! We can also scale up or down as needed, and if we require additional ports, it only takes five minutes to increase capacity.”
75% Reduction in time to create reports
Creating reports was a time-consuming process with Wine Country Gift Baskets’ old system. “Our old Nortel system didn’t have all-in-one reporting,” explains Armando Armendariz, Contact Center Manager. “I had to run different reports to analyze various metrics. It took up to an hour a day. With CXone Reporting, I can run all of them in just 15 minutes. That’s a 75% reduction in time,” says Armando.
Visibility into important metrics also improved significantly with CXone Reporting. “We only need to run one report for insights into the number of inbound and outbound calls, available time and more. We can catch critical trends and address them right away,” says Armando.
After saying goodbye to its outdated mix of contact center systems, Wine Country Gift Baskets dramatically reduced expenses, improved the customer experience and boosted agents’ job satisfaction with CXone.
The company also realized significant efficiency gains, since CXone is a centralized platform that consolidates all the functionality it needs. “It’s almost like we had tin cans on a string but didn’t fully realize it until we made the switch,” says Andy. “The improvement we’ve seen with CXone has been that dramatic.”
“Our experience with CXone has only been positive,” says Jeff. “I highly recommend it to any contact center. We’ve saved money and have a much better contact center solution.”
