When your company starts as a small country store and has been helping families turn houses into homes with your products for over 40 years, customer service is at the heart of everything Plow & Hearth puts forward. From that small store feel to the comfort of the mail order catalog, meeting the customer where they are is an important part of a successful Customer Experience.
For Plow & Hearth, being able to meet the demands of their customer has always been important, whether that was fulfilling mail orders from the farm in the early years or chatting online for shipping options today. So, when they approached InflowCX, they had one thing in mind: how to continue the legacy of Customer Experience in today’s world.
Like many companies today one of the major challenges was how to enable a remote and seasonal workforce to deliver for their customers. The convergence of work-from-home, innovation in the cloud for the contact center, and the limitations of their on-premise system increased the urgency for making a change.
Workforce management became a top priority coupled with an increased demand for online fulfillment for the customer orders. This also presented technical challenges with setup, deployment, training, and everything else that comes with a new system.
However, going from premise-based technology to remote increased the talent pool exponentially when seeking new talent.
“The ability to go from fishing from a pond to national for agents was important due to the labor shortage”
Leslie Newton, CEO, Plow & Hearth
Clearly, the cloud was the right move, however in a crowded space knowing where to start can be the biggest hurdle. With everyone claiming automation and AI-enabled technology, it can feel like a sea of the same. That is where Plow & Hearth turned to InflowCX.
“InflowCX prides itself on a non-biased customer-centric approach. We are confident in our experience in contact center consulting that the right solution is always available. That confidence comes from always starting with the customer, their audience, needs, and not the product.”
Mike Dolloff, Chief Revenue Officer, InflowCX
With the increase in business, and the work shortage in full effect, Intelligent Virtual Agents or IVA was a clear cost-effective solution. Being able to answer calls virtually and route calls in a more timely fashion was not available within the confines of their current system.
Messages, emails, chat, everything was all in different places. Implementing omnichannel support or a single pane of glass was imperative. Automation, routing emails more effectively, CRM integration, and visibility were among the long list of opportunities that were uncovered during the discovery phase.
Taking into consideration all of the needs wants, opportunities, challenges, and wishlists it was time to make a choice. Even though the timing was of the essence to get something implemented, their decision was not hasty by any means.
“It was helpful to have InflowCX go through a scorecard without influencing me but showing the strengths and weaknesses of providers”
said Leslie Newton, CEO, Plow & Hearth
When it comes to delivering an amazing Customer Experience in the Contact Center, Five9 was the clear choice to enable the team to meet the customer where they are at. Making it easy to do business with them, and get their amazing products in the homes of Americans before the holidays.
Some of the considerations when choosing Five9 over others were:
- The self-service channels offered to deflect requests that agents don’t need to handle.
- Having omnichannel service all in one place to meet the customer where they are at, has changed a lot since the last system was implemented.
- ROI of the investment was important
- The flexibility & functionality in the system for WFH and remote working.
- More automation and agent enablement especially with IVR scripting
The timing of the project was tenuous given the need for implementation before the holiday shopping season. Mitigating risk while meeting a tight deadline is something InflowCX has a lot of experience with, and that experience and the “we have been here before” attitude helped make this a smooth transition. Having a project manager to guide the process and communicate the next steps was paramount to the success of this project.
With remote workers, there will be issues, and the majority of those issues can be solved with live people helping to guide the way. There was a lot to coordinate however Plow & Hearth never felt the project was in doubt as InflowCX stuck to the timeline. Even given all of the challenges we were happy to hear from Leslie that “this was the smoothest major project that she has ever been a part of”.
Plow & Hearth knew they needed a change, and had a list of providers they were familiar with. Of course, they were skeptical if anything free was worth it when considering InflowCX’s no-cost contact center consulting services. The scorecard, experience, project accountability infrastructure that is built-in, and education that InflowCX provided quickly removed any doubt.
We are doing things differently here at InflowCX and would love for you to see why we are different in what seems like a sea of sameness in the contact center landscape. Attend a webinar, join our mailing list or simply start a chat to see why companies like Plow & Hearth trust their legacy to InflowCX.
