How to make the customer service of a multinational more efficient: our project for Unox Spa

Customer Service is the department of a company that often has the greatest problems of efficiency and fluidity of processes, as it is completely "dragged" by market needs. As a result, it is perceived as a cost, rather than as an asset.

But in a global market that has shifted attention from the product to the person, the customer experience becomes fundamental: customer service is therefore the first loyalty tool of the customers acquired and directly determines the present and future turnover of the company.

In this article we analyze the work we did for Unox Spa and how we managed to make the customer service of this multinational more efficient, paving the way for the application of Smart Working.

Unox spa headquarters in Cadoneghe (PD)

Company and customer service active all over the world

Unox Spa is an Italian company specialized in the production of technologically professional ovens advanced , operating worldwide. Unox products are intended for the catering sector, with a clientele that includes the individual restaurant, retailer and large-scale distribution companies (eg ovens for the preparation of dishes in supermarkets and shopping centers).

Given the variety of customers, customer service relates to different types of customers : chefs, dealers and other customer service departments located around the world.
The team is composed of highly trained technicians and is organized according to lean methodologies , in order to work in the most flexible and dynamic way possible: the goal is to restore the correct operation of the oven within 8 hours from reporting the fault.

Our work for Unox started in 2018 . Previously, customer service was in the situation of not being able to manage calls from customers in 50% of cases: despite the methodologies lean, the tools adopted constituted a constraint that could not be circumvented. An unacceptable situation, which Unox has tried to solve it with an upgrade of the digital technologies used.

Method first, then digital technologies

The purpose of any Digital Transformation activity is to improve the performance of the process company . This is a fundamental point: everything starts from the process, which must be well defined and efficient.

It is important to specify that the whole process was already handled by modern digital tools, but not all they exploited Cloud technology: consequently they did not work harmoniously with each other and were not independent from the operator's workplace.

Starting from this assumption, we analyzed the state of the art of Unox customer service, identifying the project requirements . From the early stages of the project we have applied our approach Agile, starting from the "proof of concept" , a project validation starting from requirements essential: cloud tools that could make everything adhere to the theoretical process.

In the face of a positive response, we then moved on to a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) , also involving the company's customers. To solve the technical limitations of the telephone channel, we have chosen Amazon Connect : a cloud PBX provided by Amazon Web Services, which allows you to manage global calls with no call capacity limit in a highly scalable way. In addition, it allows you to implement a multi-country telephone number, which offers customers the possibility to always contact a number telephone of your country.
We have also integrated SalesForce , a tool already extensively adopted in the company, for the collection and management of information from customers.

Following the Agile method, we worked iteratively and incrementally . For the MVP stage and the implementation of Amazon Connect did not involve the entire department but only the service manager, the IT manager, a reference person (key person) as a technical operator and a well-defined pool of customers (all located in French territory). After a few weeks we were able to collect the data that allowed us to further refine the proposed solution, and then extend it to all the company's customers and therefore to all telephone numbers.

The problems solved, the results obtained

Our work has resulted in a system of digital tools that has revolutionized the performance of the Unox customer service.

Thanks to Amazon Connect, the PBX can handle a virtually infinite number of calls. For every call, the operator can instantly access all data relating to the caller : status of operation of its products to any contractual obligations, billing details, up to the entire history of previous interactions with the customer.
The goal is to provide the operator with all the information he has need to give an answer to the caller, without having to search for information between the various channels and platforms: the system, being integrated within the CRM, allows you to manage everything through a single interface .

All this translates into an important streamlining of workflow and the possibility to create comprehensive statistics on service performance.

During the testing phase, we took the SL90 indicator as a reference.
SL90 stands for Service Level 90 : it is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that indicates the percentage of calls that are answered in 90 seconds.
Using this indicator, we measured a response rate of 70% depending on caller queues, which are mainly due to the need to address the caller to an operator who speaks his language.
In two months we have gone from being unable to manage more of half of the customers to manage 70% within the first 90 seconds: all this without changing the process, without changing the size of the team and with a limited initial investment.

Furthermore, by analyzing the data collected we found some special cases relating to this KPI, with a pattern that always occurred on certain days and times of the week. Following this discovered, the team has readjusted the conventions and habits of the operators, increasing the percentage by 5% of responses within the first 90 seconds, over the course of a single week.

A continuously improving system, thanks to the Agile method

Our collaboration with Unox continues: applying the principles of the Agile method, we use the data collected by system to monitor its efficiency and detect opportunities for improvement.
In this way, we saw the possibility of extending the use of the system to other departments of the company, such as the back office commercial, which today uses the Nosco Contact Center module born from this first need.

Our work has opened up interesting opportunities also in terms of Smart Working . The system made it possible to transform customer service into a team distributed all over the world : in this way, each operator has at his disposal a tool that aggregates the data collected by each member of the team.
This also opens up the possibility of entrusting maintenance interventions to professionals chosen in a technical park distributed all over the world.