1-800-Flowers goes home to increase call center support for Valentine`s Day
At one of its busiest sales times of the year, more than 1,000 call center agents are taking orders this week for 1-800-Flowers.com—including some 300 who are doing it from phone and PC set-ups in their own homes as employees of outsourced, web-based contact center services provider Alpine Access. Alpine, which supports 1-800-Flowers throughout the year, also helps spread peak loads among call center agents at Christmas and Mothers Day, the retailer’s two other busiest holidays.
The in-home, web-based model is the future of call centers, believes Chris Carrington, Alpine’s CEO. “It aligns the needs of a company with the resources available in the marketplace in real time, and it provides a better outcome from a call, whether it’s customer service or sales,” he says.
Specifically, Carrington says contact center service from Alpine typically has increased average order value by 10% to 20% over even a retailer’s own employed, in-house call center agents. The Internet is at the center of what makes that possible Carrington adds, as it allows the company to search across the country to find and hire agents with more advanced skills, rather than limiting that search to the smaller geographic radius of a bricks-and-mortar call center. Alpine hired only 2-3% of the 117,000 applications it received for agents’ positions last year, says Carrington, who contrasts that to a bricks-and-mortar call center whose annual applications may number in the low thousands.
The web also give remotely-working agents the same real-time access to customer history, the company’s order entry system, inventory status and other data that agents working within the retailer’s in-house call center have. The remote agents use the web to link from their home PC to Alpine’s web center, which passes them through to its retailer client`s in-house systems.
“Alpine agents have visibility into our transaction system. We can also push training videos out to agents through the web, and give those agents access to images and specs of a product or selling tips. The agents at home have the same view of our products,” says Connie Adcock, vice president of customer care at 1-800-Flowers. She adds that the web-based system equalizes the data and tools available to its own agents and to Alpine’s home-based agents. “The only difference,” she says. “is that they might be sitting there in their pajamas.”
1-800-Flowers.com founder and CEO Jim McCann will give the Day One Keynote Address, The Web: Powering the Reinvention of Retailing, at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose.
1-800-Flowers.com is No. 35 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
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