Challenges

The Icelandic store of the world’s biggest furniture retailer IKEA has more than 250 employees and services a population of 320,000 people. Each day hundreds of telephone enquiries come in from customers asking about opening times, product delivery schedules, installation issues and many other topics. As a famously customer- focused organization, IKEA wanted to answer all of these calls as quickly, efficiently and as friendly as possible.

Unfortunately, the telephone system that the store was using had limited monitoring and reporting systems. So it was impossible to know how many customers were calling and how quickly they were being answered. And even more importantly, it could not indicate how many customers were abandoning their calls due to frustration of long queues.

Solution

After an in-depth selection process, the IKEA store chose a UNIVERGE® SV8100 with Business ConneCT, which was installed by Pfaff Telecom. “The advanced call metrics show us exactly what’s going on,” says Ölvir Styrr Sveinsson the store’s IT Manager. “We can see the rate at which calls are coming in, each agent’s response times, and the average waiting times. This means that we can quickly divert staff to the call centre at peak times and ensure that no one is kept waiting too long. Even better, we can monitor traffic patterns, anticipate busy periods and adjust manning levels accordingly.”

IKEA also uses 60 DECT handsets and 12 SIP radios “Our people must be mobile, but they must always be immediately contactable. Their individual expertise is key to efficiently answering customer enquiries from both inside and outside the store.”

Results

“Obviously we don’t know what the average waiting times were with the old system - nor how many customers we were losing,” says Sveinsson. “But on day one of the SV8100 we saw that we were answering only about 15% of all calls within 10 seconds. So we immediately increased the number of call agents from two to five and increased that hit rate to 65%. By further utilizing the predictive capabilities of Business ConneCT we aim to handle up to 600 calls a day, 90% of which will be answered within 10 seconds.”

In addition to a very attractive price-performance, IKEA Iceland cites the SV8100’s modularity and scalability as one of the main reasons for choosing the system. The inherent flexibility enabled them to specify an exact fitting solution, but with the peace of mind that they could easily reshape and expand it as their future needs change. “You don’t dig a garden with a teaspoon neither do you use a 600-tonne earthmover, you use the right tool. And that’s what the SV8100 is. With an extremely wide choice of configuration possibilities it was easily designed to perfectly fit our needs,” says Sveinsson.