Japanese contact centre provides greater service to its customers.
A contact centre's ability to provide quality customer service is intrinsically linked to its communications network. If the phone system is unreliable or lacks versatility, the organisation's ability to communicate effectively with clients will suffer.
Patagonia felt trapped by its restrictive PBX system
Like many businesses around the world, Patagonia, an outdoor clothing and gear designer, had long relied on a private branch exchange (PBX) system to handle calls in its Japanese contact centre. However, as many companies have come to realise, there were some severe limitations to the conventional communications framework. Mr Dai Hoshino of the eCommerce Patagonia Japan Branch detailed some of his concerns with the company's PBX system, including:
- Inflexible: Simple adjustments to the system, such as increasing the number of seats, were costly and needed to be planned months in advance. What's more, the vendor didn't always respond to urgent requests. The expensive, glacial process was not suited to the fast paced, dynamic contact centre environment.
- Recording limitations: Supervisors had limited ability to listen to employees' call recordings, as they could only do so in particular seats. To make matters worse, some recordings failed altogether.
- Manual reporting: Data reports allowed Patagonia to improve the service it provided. However, under a PBX framework, this information had to be calculated manually, which was time consuming and an inefficient use of resources.
Patagonia needed a system that would not only enable it to provide better customer service, but also allow it to easily expand its contact centre further down the line. This meant upgrading to a next-generation internet protocol private branch exchange (IP-PBX) system that was flexible and powerful enough to meet the demands of the business. After assessing his options, Mr Hoshino eventually settled on Trixbox Pro.
