Hamleys
Cloud-based IVR solutions leads to greater efficiency and customer satisfaction
Hamleys is one of the world's largest toy shops. Its flagship store is in Regent Street, London and is considered one of London's major tourist attractions, and receives about five million visitors a year. Hamleys flagship London store has seven floors covering 54,000 square feet (5,000 m2), all devoted to playthings, with different categories of toy on each floor.
Any parent who’s ever visited Regent Street just before Christmas will know exactly how busy Hamleys – ‘the finest toy store in the world’ – gets during peak shopping periods. Yet few people realise how busy times like this also dramatically increase the store’s telephone traffic – with customer queries running at well over 3000 a day.
The Problem
Hamleys incoming calls were being answered by a single agent, who would then transfer customers directly to shop floor representatives, a process which would often result in the engaged tone and lost calls. Not only was this losing revenue but it was also having a negative impact on the Hamleys brand.
In additions to this the company had too many suppliers of telephony infrastructure to be cost effectively managed and the call costs were too high; Hamleys couldn’t take advantage of any economies of scale. Further to this, as they discovered when a local telephone exchange caught fire and they were without call handling capability for three days, there was no resiliency in the system.
The Solution
Freedom proposed and implemented a Managed IT solution whereby all inbound and outbound lines were managed by one supplier and all billing was amalgamated onto one bill.
As part of this solution we provided a ‘cloudbased’ IVR solution that provides complete flexibility for call handling workflows. This can support time of day, day of week and even on-the-fly call routing to support specific promotional activity for any given toy. This
also incorporates a one button activation of the disaster recovery call routing plan and Hamleys can record their own IVR messages as WAV files and use these in the routing of sales calls.
Benefits Experienced
The Senior management team now has a more resilient business where the risk of losing revenue based on external catastrophes is greatly reduced. In addition to securing and protecting an increase in revenue Hamleys have also seen improvements to their reputation as the ‘finest toyshop in the world’.
The Finance team have seen an uplift in revenues based on sales of toys, but also a saving in cost as Freedom acts as a single point of contact. This not only reduces time spent managing suppliers but also allows Hamleys to take advantage of economies of scale.
We have also opened a new revenue stream for Hamleys in that they receive a share of revenue from the 0871 telephone numbering scheme that we designed and implemented for them.
The Technical and IT team have the peace of mind that they can implement their disaster recovery and business continuity call routing plan with quite literally a single press of a single button. The cloud-based IVR solution allows then to implement customized ‘time-of-day’ call routing to better support business-led initiatives.
In addition to this they are able to provide the management team with a combination of real-time and historical statistical reports so that better management decisions can be made to sustain the growth of the business.
Customers benefits from being able to purchase the toys that their excited children would like! They have a much more useful and satisfactory experience when they phone is as the IVR system ensures that they are better informed of call progress and company information.
Inefficient customer voice systems with no resiliency reflected poorly on the brand; high costs resulted from the inability to exploit economies of scale.
A highly efficient Freedom managed call centre routes and manages all voice calls through a cloud based IVR call handling workflow solution.
Uplifted sales through customer service efficiency; reduced telephony costs from economy of scale; management information improves business decision making, improved reputation.
