Market leader makes customer care miles better

Care isn’t just part of the name at GSK Nutritional Healthcare. It’s at the heart of its customer help lines. Keen to boost customer service with new technology, a review of the market GSK to BT Cloud Contact powered by Enghouse Interactive.

Now, with better call routing facilities, customers always get straight through to the right agent, while better management information and the ability to record calls is helping to boost customer service even more. And if the pace heats up or bad weather hits employees’ journeys, GSK can change things in an instant; all at a budget-friendly price.

Background

GSK Nutritional Healthcare develops and markets leading healthcare drinks like Lucozade, Ribena, and Horlicks. It is part of UK-headquartered GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a pharmaceutical world leader. Ashley Thomas is Consumer Care Manager at the GSK Nutritional Healthcare Coleford manufacturing facility in the Royal Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Among his responsibilities is running the Lucozade, Ribena, and Horlicks customer help lines. Until recently, legacy telephone technology was a hindrance to Ashley and his team.

As Ashley explains: “We were unable to record telephone calls, essential for the protection of both consumers and our own staff. Also we could not capture and use statistics to measure and improve our service.”

Solution

With consumer expectations continually rising, GSK Nutritional Healthcare sought a solution. A review of the market led Ashley Thomas to the BT Cloud Contact platform. A ready-to-use fully hosted service, Cloud Contact provides powerful multi-channel contact centre functionality on a subscription basis.

“We chose BT Cloud Contact because it was very competitive in price and the functionality was very good. It enabled us to record every call, as we wanted. It also included all the reporting we needed, and much more in fact,” says Ashley. “The management interface was really user friendly too.” GSK Nutritional Healthcare teamed the Cloud Contact platform with BT Inbound Contact 0800 non‑geographic numbers for a complete solution.

“Because it’s a hosted solution we only pay for what we use. It’s not a huge capital expenditure,” adds Ashley. “Another benefit of that was speed of implementation, because there were no complicated boxes to configure and install.”

Benefits

GSK Nutritional Healthcare chose the BT Cloud Contact solution primarily for call recording purposes to safeguard the consumer as well as the agent. But it has other benefits, for example in guiding agent training and adding to their skills.

Taking advantage of many other Cloud Contact features GSK Nutritional Healthcare has been able, as another example, to use IVR (Interactive Voice Response) so that callers are able to specify the brand they want to talk about. This ensures that they reach the right agent first time. As well as voicemail for when the office is not attended, call logging provides a record of who has called, day or night. Furthermore, BT Cloud Contact multi‑channel capabilities will enable agents to handle queries by email, text and fax.

BT Inbound Architect, which is included in the package, not only provides a wealth of call traffic reports, but also enables GSK Nutritional Healthcare to self-configure the service. “It’s very easy to manoeuvre inbound numbers to different locations,” concludes Ashley, “for instance if we have to work from home or in a disaster situation. In fact, during the wintry weather in early 2010 we were able to re-direct calls to people’s homes simply by changing their user preferences.”

GSK Nutritional Healthcare has also found the Cloud Contact self-service system management facility useful to screen out nuisance calls. Finally, the GSK Nutritional Healthcare web team is working with BT specialists to take advantage of advanced services such as web chat. This will enable a visitor to a GSK Nutritional Healthcare website to speak direct to an agent as part of their internet experience.