Case Study: DSW

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

In 1991, DSW started as a single store that was open three days a week. Today, DSW operates nearly 550 stores in the US and Canada.

However, its successful expansion was hampered by its outdated on-premises Genesys system, which was unstable and difficult to update. As the company grew and interaction volumes increased, Genesys made it difficult to keep up.

“Genesys wasn’t keeping pace with our growth,” says Tim Harpe, director of global customer operations. “Since it was on-premises, we were locked in to a specific level of support that we could provide to our customers, which restricted our growth.

“We were using multiple tools for voice, email and chat, which made it difficult to get reports for each channel, plus it was challenging to know when agents needed to be shifted to handle fluctuating volumes.”

Genesys’s inflexibility also made it difficult to update the system in real time. “One person in our IT department had the knowledge and ability to make system updates,” explains Tim. “When we needed real-time changes, we had to hope he wasn’t working on something else.”

It was also an expensive system to maintain. “If I wanted to add or remove agents, I often needed to contract a professional outside our organization. Near the end, Genesys was also very unstable, so we couldn’t count on it, which impacted customer support,” Tim says.

This threatened DSW’s business continuity if a disaster occurred. “If, God forbid, a car drove into our home office and shut down operations, we would have had no way to service customers,” says Tim. “When COVID-19 hit, our call volumes increased 70%. With Genesys, it would have been impossible to move all our agents to working from home and simultaneously service the massive increase in volume.”

DSW also couldn’t easily grow its operations, including using cost-effective overseas BPOs. “We couldn’t even entertain the idea of using BPOs to expand our contact center. There were too many hurdles to overcome,” Tim continues.

OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED

“We have a true partner with NICE CXone”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, DSW had to quickly move its worldwide contact center agents to working from home. It was made possible by the CXone cloud platform, which allows agents to work from any location as long as they have an Internet connection and login information.

“The pandemic really illustrated how important it is to have a true cloud partner like NICE CXone,” says Tim. “The flexibility we have with CXone meant we could quickly send everyone home — even though they’re located around the world.”

In fact, it’s running so smoothly that Tim intends to keep some agents working remotely. “It’s now a strategic objective for us going forward,” he says. “I don’t plan to bring everyone back on-site ever again, because it’s important that we have a system, like CXone, that allows us to continue working and servicing customers regardless of whatever hits us. We need that business continuity.”

COVID-19 also caused a dramatic increase in interaction volumes, which DSW handled smoothly. “When the pandemic hit, we closed down all of our stores, so customers reached out to our contact center for help with transactions,” says Tim. “It resulted in a 70% increase in volume between April and May 2020.”

However, DSW didn’t need to hire more agents, due to CXone’s flexibility. “During the first few weeks of the increased volume, we used CXone to manage the number of incoming interactions so our agents could service them in a reasonable time frame. As the agents got settled at home, we increased the number of interactions coming into the contact center. This is another advantage of CXone: we can easily shift interactions to different channels or give customers the choice of having an agent call them back. And we could make those changes ourselves in real time.”

Reduced handle time by two minutes with new virtual agent from SmartAction

Bringing all of DSW’s channels together on the CXone omnichannel platform resulted in greater visibility and efficiency. “With CXone, we know which channel needs additional support so we can quickly make adjustments such as skilling or reskilling agents. That’s a huge benefit,” Tim declares.

Handle time immediately fell by two minutes when DSW added a virtual agent from SmartAction to CXone. The addition of the virtual agent was seamless and efficient due to CXone’s flexibility. The virtual agent is used to authenticate customers before they are connected to an agent. “This was during the pre-COVID-19 days,” says Tim. “Authentication helps us know who the caller is and what they’re calling about, which immediately reduced handle time,” says Tim.

Post-call surveys boost customer recovery rate to 95%

DSW uses CXone Feedback Management to offer customers the opportunity to take post-call surveys in order to provide feedback. The data has been used to reduce costs, eliminate the need to hire additional employees and optimize internal processes.

Tim explains: “CXone Feedback Management is the perfect tool to allow us to capture customer feedback about how long they wait for help. We use that information to determine the right ratio between wait time and customer satisfaction. Using the survey feedback, we know that our customers are OK waiting up to five minutes to talk to an agent. That information helps us optimize our staffing so our customer satisfaction doesn’t suffer, and we’re employing the optimal number of agents.

“The beautiful thing is it’s not a guess — CXone Feedback Management gives us the hard data to justify this to our finance department.”

Tim concludes by stating that the NICE CXone team is extremely easy to work with. “We consider them true business partners,” he says.

He continues: “With CXone, we’ve had the flexibility to grow our business quickly — that’s huge. It’s also critical that CXone enables us to operate a global contact center operation on one platform.

“It all adds up to a much better business and customer experience. I’m so glad we made the switch to CXone,” he concludes. “Trust me, it’s really been life-changing.”