A leading North American consumer electronics retailer, with a strong brand presence and over 100,000 employees, was facing operational inefficiencies due to its legacy systems and complex IT ecosystem. With over 1,000 retail locations, several subsidiaries and millions of customers annually, the company struggled with rising costs, inconsistent application performance and fragmented systems that hindered its ability to scale efficiently. They needed a partner who could help them overcome these challenges and that is where HCLTech stepped in as their technology partner. We delivered a full-fledged digital transformation for their customer service ecosystem. By deploying Dynamics 365, our flagship suite of solutions, we increased their customer service capabilities and improved critical KPIs.
The Challenge
Legacy systems affecting the quality of customer service
The client approached HCLTech seeking a technology partner to help deliver a full digital transformation of their customer service ecosystem. One of the key challenges was integrating Oracle and Comergent, as well as 15 different legacy systems, many of which were built in-house on aging technology. The service level experienced by customers was often heavily dependent on the level of knowledge of their service rep, while manual processes throughout the business meant that customer service teams could not focus fully on the customer's needs.
The Objective
Full digital transformation streamlining disparate systems
The client engaged HCLTech to deliver a complete technology transformation. The objective was to design and implement a state-of-the-art, reliable, expandable and customizable CRM solution, with additional functionality at a business-unit level, to meet the needs of individual business units. Additionally, manual processes were to be reduced across the organization and knowledge-sharing tools were implemented to provide consistent customer experience.
The Solution
Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation does the heavy lifting for customer service
The solution included deploying Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, including the Customer Service, Sales and Field Service workloads. We also implemented USD and Microsoft portals to integrate 15 disparate systems into one with Power BI, Azure and several PowerPack add-ons. We developed several unique Power Apps solutions to meet the needs of the individual business units.
HCLTech built a knowledge management tool that combined all sources into one hub accessible by the 28,000 help desk agents. Knowledge authors access the interactive service hub to create and maintain articles, while the agents use the portal to access the relevant information.
We built a custom-integrated chat-based service and repair delivery model for use by the client’s tech support center. The solution has complete integration with the Oracle ERP system and their remote connectivity service, allowing calls and chats to be seamlessly transferred between agents. The client, HCLTech and Microsoft worked in close collaboration due to extensive internal security roles and protocols that meant developing specific and stable processes to meet requirements.
The Impact
Increased capabilities and improvement of critical KPIs
- Seamless integration between the Dynamics 365 workloads and Azure Service Bus, Application Insights, Azure SQL, Azure Blobs and Azure Functions.
- The custom-integrated chat-based service/repair delivery model supports 2,200 agents across multiple physical locations, with as many as 1,200 active concurrently. The team can now handle over 15,000 chat sessions daily.
- In the contact center, personalized dashboards offer clarity to each customer service agent around their unique workflows, queues, and casework.
- The knowledge management tool was initially launched for testing -by 8,000 contact center agents. Shortly thereafter, it was expanded to 20,000. All of the knowledge articles are also available for self-help on the tech help desk’s customer-facing website. In an average year, the site had 5-6M page views; once HCLTech launched the tool, the site had more than 9M in just the first eight months. The site averages 20,000 unique users monthly.
- Hold times were reduced by 23.8% from the previous year. This is a critical KPI for the call center and is due largely to the real-time access to the knowledgebase articles. On a monthly basis, the agents in the contact center average 50,000 article views.
