Fat Face

Sector: Retail

Key Features: Multi-Site Contact Centre

Fat Face utilise SpliceCom's Callmedia for maximiser Contact Centre solution to enable their call centre agents to handle phone calls and emails from their web-based storefront and catalogue sales operation.

"We wanted a competitively priced, IP based telephone/Call Centre system that would help to drive the future growth of Fat Face's business. SpliceCom's maximiser was the only business telephone system we found that put a "tick" in both boxes." 

Shane Lewis - IT Project Engineer - Fat Face.

 

The Business Problem

In addition to its portfolio of 101 high street retail outlets throughout the UK, not to mention 3 stores in the Alps and one in Iceland, active lifestyle clothing brand Fat Face provides a web-based storefront for internet based orders and queries, alongside an extremely successful catalogue operation. Founded in 1988 and a run away retail success story for the late nineties and early noughties, delivering unprecedented growth, Fat Face realised in early 2003 that their current Call Centre technology, providing the foundation of their catalogue and web business, was quickly running out of steam. The Avaya ArgentOffice telephone system it was based on was reaching its limits in terms of extension capacity, whilst the ARC Call Centre application itself just couldn't produce the reports required for forward business planning purposes.

Searching For The Solution

Valuing the importance of the Call Centre to their ongoing business growth, Fat Face drew a "virtual" team together for the first half of 2003 to decide the way forward. With senior management representatives from IT, catalogue sales and the Call Centre, the Fat Face team started by evaluating the various options open to them. However, one by one, all the telephone system/call centre combinations evaluated were discounted for reasons of high price and/or delivering limited functionality which meant they would not be flexible enough to meet Fat Face's requirements. The solution, when it came, was brought to the attention of Fat Face's by their long standing telephony supplier Datatel. The UK based management and development team responsible for originally bringing Avaya's ArgentOffice/IP Office to market had started a new company; this time to focus on a pure IP based business telephone system. SpliceCom was formed in 2001 and began shipping their maximiser IP PBX in early 2003.

IP Holds The Answer

Fat Face IT Project Engineer Shane Lewis takes up the story. "To ensure we didn't run into the same limits of capacity and functionality again we wanted a competitively priced IP based telephone/Call Centre system that would help to drive the future growth of Fat Face's business. Everything we had previously looked at was either too expensive, or, if it met our budgetary requirements, was of a hybrid TDM/IP design. This would compromise its effectiveness to Fat Face - in terms of size, feature set and life expectancy. SpliceCom's maximiser was the only business telephone system we found to put a "tick" in both boxes. The ability to provide cost-effective telephony by supporting both IP and analogue extensions on a pure IP system - and to treat them as equals - is a "feature" that the other IP Telephony providers appear to have overlooked."

Overlaid on top of the business telephone system, Callmedia for maximiser provides Fat Face with a full, multi-media Contact Centre solution. The initial requirement was to provide the means for agents to handle orders and enquiries by phone and email, however, the modular SpliceCom solution also allows SMS text messages and web mirroring/web-chat to be added to the overall mix whenever Fat Face may require it.

Success Fuels Expansion

The rapid growth in Fat Face's sales and the resulting increase in staff levels, led to the call centre staff being relocated to a separate building a little over a mile away from the head office. The two building are connected together via a 10Mb LAN Extension Service (LES), which carries telephone calls and data between the two sites. Fat Face has chosen to deploy two maximiser Call Servers - one on each site - to handle all calls across the business. This allows calls that arrive at the call centre, or the head office to be distributed seamlessly to employees or contact centre agents as appropriate, no matter where they may be located. Despite its distribution across their two sites, Fat Face manage maximiser as a single, unified telephone system. In addition, this architecture allows the servers hosting all Fat Face's business applications - including Callmedia for maximiser - to reside within the Head Office Data Centre. Call Centre agents are then able to access the relevant applications using Citrix thin-client terminals.

All Becomes Clear

The overall SpliceCom solution provided by Datatel, has provided Fat Face with a far greater depth and breadth of information than their previous Call Centre system. The delivery of advanced contact centre functionality, sophisticated call routing, detailed real-time statistics and historical reports has enabled Fat Face to review and improve the service they are able to deliver to their customers. "Now we can take calls anywhere, and see our statistics from any location we like," said Fat Face Call Centre Manager, Rachel Cowley. "It's like a breath of fresh air," said Ian Shaw, Retail Director. "We now know what is actually happening when customers call in. Before, we had no idea how well or badly we were performing and if you don't know how good your customer service is, you can't improve it. Now we can see what needs enhancing, and can act upon it."

Making A Difference

"The introduction of the SpliceCom solution has made a great deal of difference to our business at many different levels," says Shane Lewis. "From the operational viewpoint we no longer have to angst over the addition of new extensions as our workforce increases. Day to day management of the system is simple, with the ability to implement adds, moves and changes via a standard web browser from anywhere on the network - including remotely via VPN access. And there's now no-need to re-boot the system after making an administrative change as we had to before. At the business level, Callmedia for maximiser delivers a wide-range of management statistics, including reports on all the queues, tasks and campaigns we run. In particular this allows us to forward plan for our busy periods during the week and accurately schedule extra staff during our sales periods."

Future Developments

maximiser's flexibility is well suited to Fat Face's business. The company is already considering the re-location of the Call Centre to an empty building close to the Head Office. By then linking the two buildings by fibre, maximiser could provide a Voice over IP (VoIP) network over the entire Fat Face estate. The possibilities of expanding the roll of Callmedia for maximiser within Fat Face, are also numerous. The architecture will support remote Call Centre agents located in other countries, or, by boosting the number of agents in-house, allow overseas customers to deal with the existing call centre using local rate numbers. Fat Face are also considering adding web-chat - the ability to establish a text "dialogue" with a customer visiting the Fat Face website - to enhance their existing customer service offerings. Callmedia for maximiser allows web-chat to be blended with telephone calls and emails, supporting multiple queues for each media type, with each separate queue being allocated its own service levels, thresholds, priorities, escalation levels, etc. Finally, Fat Face are investigating the addition of a Customer Response Management (CRM) system to their existing Customer Database and then linking this to Callmedia for maximiser to provide the basis for focused sales campaigns.

Summing up the entire project, Shane Lewis said, "It's been great talking with real people who understood our business needs and helped us through every stage - from initial discussions to rollout and beyond. Fat Face were confident in SpliceCom's ability to meet our requirements, however, we both appreciated and enjoyed the personal touch."

Project Highlights

Fat Face has implemented a unified business telephone system & call centre over two sites, using SpliceCom's maximiser as the basis. maximiser's distributed and scalable architecture has allowed the call centre agents to be located in a completely separate location to the head office, where the IT application servers, including those for the call centre, are located. The agents handle enquiries, requests and orders by telephone and email, with SpliceCom's Callmedia for maximiser application controlling and prioritising the routing and delivery of both media types. Despite being spread across two sites, maximiser's pure IP design allows it to operate as a single telephone system for Fat Face's customers, employees and IT staff alike. This allows telephone calls arriving at either site to be automatically delivered to the intended recipient - wherever they might be.

System Summary

Head Office

  • One 4100 Call Server
  • One 4200 Trunk Module
  • Six 4330 Phone Modules
  • 60 ISDN Channels
  • 180 Analogue Extensions
  • PCS 50 Phone Partner Software
  • Eight port voicemail
  • Auto-attendant

Call Centre

  • One 4100 Call Server
  • One 4330 Phone Module
  • 30 ISDN Channels
  • 30 Analogue Extensions
  • PCS 50 Phone Partner Software
  • Eight port voicemail
  • Auto-attendant
  • Callmedia for maximiser
  • 15 Phone agents
  • 5 Email agents

Customer Benefits

  • Improvement in customer service levels.
  • Choice of contact method for enquiries, requests or orders - by telephone or email.
  • Single "Task Engine" for phone calls and email means all customers get equal treatment, however they choose to contact Fat Face.

Commercial Benefits 

  • Call Centre agents now receive enquiries, requests and orders by telephone and email.
  • Multiple queues - each with their own service levels, alarms, reports, etc- are provided for telephone hunt groups and email addresses.
  • Management reports and statistics are available in real-time and on an historical basis for each individual queue and across the call centre as a whole - for both telephone calls and emails.
  • Breadth and depth of Management Reports allows accurate planning for staffing levels in the short, medium and long term.
  • Fat Face has been able to re-locate their Call Centre operation to a separate building.
  • No practical limit to the number of extensions or sites that can be added to the Fat Face telephone system as business expansion needs dictate.
  • Options to add SMS Messaging and/or web-chat as additional Call Centre contact options in the future if/when required.
  • System management is independent of both computer and location, via any standard web browser, from any location where network connectivity can be obtained.

 Staff Benefits

  • Calls to either building can be routed to staff wherever they might be.
  • Ability to support multiple-locations has allowed Call Centre staff to be re-located to their own office.
  • Mobility and Homeworking enabled for key staff.