About Plantiflor
Plantiflor has been providing high quality
horticultural products direct to the customer for many years; growing from strength to strength to become one of Britain’s most trusted mail order garden catalogue businesses.
The company traces its roots back to 1922 when Dutchman Dominicus Van Konynenburg in the Georgian Market Town of Spalding in Lincolnshire founded the Spalding Plant & Bulb Company, where flower bulbs have been grown locally for over 100 years.
In 1989 the company became part of the Bakker Group, Europe’s largest horticultural mail order company. This international organisation has over 700 employees across Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Romania, Estonia, the Republic of Ireland, and of course the UK and Netherlands.
Challenges
The flower industry is seasonal. Spring and autumn are very busy and the summer and Christmas time are relatively quiet and so the company have developed another branch of the business selling home products to ensure year round productivity and profitability. Over the past 18 months the company has been developing a range of home products under the brand name Bakker Comfort. This has proven to be a great success, which the company has exploited further by the launch of the ‘Ideas Comfort’ brand in late 2013.
The business in the UK was operating on an old Nortel phone system and call centre. The development and growth of their new brands had lead to a significant increase in customer contact.
Customers were also contacting them through different channels, such as email, which was proving difficult to manage through the old phone system whilst still delivering the customer service that they were renowned for.
Although they had extended the life of their old Meridian over the years by adding bolt ons and additions such as IVR and call recording to improve its capabilities, they could no longer provide the level of service they wanted.
Peter Fidler, Logistics Manager at Plantflor said, “Our core challenges are bringing the UK infrastructure up to a modern efficient standard as fast as possible and at the same time being aware of working with a pan European brand that operates a wide diversity of legacy communication systems and doesn’t have the UK as a priority.
We have a fixed real estate and are not really able to expand in UK so in order to make us more efficient and support the brand we need to be smart.
The Solution
Our HQ in Holland had already upgraded to an Avaya platform and is currently rolling out a new Group wide CRM system. Flexibility and power are what the company needs. Now that we have the Avaya solution in Holland and the UK, with Germany being next on the list there will be the potential for future integration into the Dutch HQ contact centre and CRM platform which will make us more effective and efficient and of course flexible.”
The solution 4net designed for Plantiflor is an Avaya Aura telephony solution with Avaya Aura Contact Centre (AACC) for 42 agents incorporating email management licenses, One X communicator softphones and EC500 mobile twinning.
The solution 4net designed
for Plantiflor is an Avaya Aura
telephony solution with Avaya
Aura Contact Centre (AACC) for
42 agents incorporating email
management licenses, One X
communicator softphones and
EC500 mobile twinning.
4net also provided their ESP service management solution to proactively monitor and manage the platform whilst providing stats on the system capacity and usage.
The company has noticed that their customer
demographic is changing, with increasing numbers of customers who are more tech savvy they needed to ensure that they catered for their changing methods of communication. The Avaya AACC solution allows Plantiflor to manage voice and email contacts by the Agent skill and priority level, which ensures that the call goes to the best available person each time. Peter continues: “We have really good people in our contact centre and a low staff churn. They are of a really high calibre and they pick up IT really quickly. Most have been with us for a long time and you may have thought that they would be unlikely to welcome change but they have been keen to learn new skills and although we have imposed lots of additional requirements they have risen to the challenge.”
The Benefits
Our HQ in Holland had already upgraded to an Avaya platform and is currently rolling out a new Group wide CRM system. Flexibility and power are what the company needs. Now that we have the Avaya solution in Holland and the UK, with Germany being next on the list there will be the potential for future integration into the Dutch HQ contact centre and CRM platform which will make us more effective and efficient and of course flexible.”
First time call resolution is a business priority and the AACC solution has helped with that. The open standard architecture lends itself to integrating with their new CRM system, which will enable screen popping and click to dial in Spring 2014. As this platform mirrors what they have in Holland they can eventually link the call centres with resilience across
the two locations and eventually across many other sites.
Avaya Aura Contact centre and Avaya Aura ME applications, provide a robust and feature rich contact centre and back office solution, reducing the required number of servers and also providing increased functionality. The solution design means that Plantiflor can roll out their future requirements, whether on site or cloud based, as their needs change.
The architecture design, which incorporates
virtualised applications within the ME server, means that the company will need a minimum investment in hardware. The majority of the licenses needed for future requirements are also bundled within the ME and contact centre solution resulting in minimal future financial investment.
The Future
In the future Plantiflor is considering the application of Video Conferencing to help reduce costs and improve communication. Peter said: “Our company is a classic example of one that would benefit from video conferencing. Our business is widely spread, our HQ is in Holland and we are separated by time space and language. A good cost effective method of communicating across locations is by video. 4net are working with us to help us do this without incurring too much up front cost.”
Other key business benefits:
–
The ability to manage and
report on all methods of
communication into the business
–Ability to integrate with the Avaya
solution and the CRM solution
in the Dutch HQ
–
Improvement of first call
resolution
–
Call centre and system is
monitored 24/7 to ensure
maximum uptime
–
Plantiflor can see trends in
changes and expansion of
licenses and ports etc. which
provides insight of additional
requirements
Why 4net
Peter continued: “4net has provided a solution that meets Plantiflor’s immediate requirements and evolving with the business can support our future needs, Our account manager is enthusiastic – we don’t feel that we are just buying a box (people have done this to us in the past) we needed to work with a partner that would support us and continually tell us what is possible.
“4net provide a consultative partnership that adds real value helping us deliver the highest level of customer service to our customers. They are also helping us, when required to build a technology strategy that ensures our business evolves to meet and exceed customer and industry demands
We are very happy with 4net, they promised that they would be full of ideas and happy to work with us and they have proved that and are delivering the quality of work I would expect”
For further information on 4net please call
0333 323 0700 or visit www.4net-technologies.com
“We are very happy with 4net, they
promised that they would be full of
ideas and happy to work with us
and they have proved that and are
delivering the quality of work I would
expect”
4net Technologies Ltd, 3 Scholar Green Road, Cobra Court, Manchester M32 0TR
