Customer Success
SICOM Finds a Better Customer Experience in Talkdesk
By Taylor Johnson
0 min read
If you’ve ever stopped at a quick-service restaurant like McDonald’s, Burger King or Tim Hortons, chances are you’ve unknowingly experienced SICOM running behind the scenes. By leveraging SICOM’s end-to-end enterprise platform, restaurants use real-time and historical data to improve quality of service, increase customer engagement and ultimately grow revenue. With more than 25,000 restaurants in over 62 countries using SICOM’s suite of solutions, SICOM is transforming the way quick service restaurants operate.
Mike Zarzeka runs information systems and IT at SICOM. It’s his job to deliver cutting-edge solutions to teams like customer support, where agents assist customers in a variety of support-related situations and installation and training. These agents specialize in helping new SICOM customers get up and running with their solution. With customer experience as one of the enterprise company’s core tenets, Zarzeka knew it was time to re-evaluate the tools these teams were using to provide their own customer experiences.
After honing in on core technology requirements, Zarzeka knew exactly what he was looking for in a new contact center platform. First, it came down to scalability and agility. “We needed a cloud-based solution that was flexible and wasn’t tied to any legacy on-prem technology,” said Zarzeka. Because SICOM acquires companies at a steady pace, it was important for him to implement a solution that enabled teams to quickly add new agents, buy new phone numbers and update IVRs with clicks, not code.
Another requirement for SICOM was ease of use, and Talkdesk came out as the clear winner. “We felt Talkdesk was easier to use and understand straight off the bat,” said Zarzeka. “If you’re doing five thousand calls per week, you need something that’s easy to use so reps can get answers to customers quicker.”
A deep integration with Salesforce was another key requirement on his list, as the support, installation and training teams spend most of their time in Salesforce Service Cloud and needed a strong Single Sign-On integration. SICOM wanted a holistic platform that gave agents what they needed in one place, not one that required separate applications for things like reporting and analytics. In the end, Talkdesk checked the right boxes for SICOM to have confidence the contact center platform could support their rapidly-growing enterprise company.
Since choosing Talkdesk, Zarzeka has seen a complete transformation in how customer support, installation and training operate and satisfy the needs of their customers. By leveraging a true IVR, customers are routed to the right agent at the right time, drastically increasing first call resolution by 17x. Training new agents, especially large groups coming in through acquisitions, is like night and day. “The overall training process is two days, with Talkdesk training taking about 15 minutes of that time. That’s a true testament to the simplicity of the solution,” said Zarzeka.
"We felt Talkdesk was easier to use and understand straight off the bat. If you’re doing five thousand calls per week, you need something that’s easy to use so reps can get answers to customers quicker."
SVP of Information Technology and Systems at SICOM
Choosing Talkdesk to Transform the Customer Experience
Talkdesk’s live and historical reporting has enabled the teams to incorporate dozens of new success metrics into their day-to-day operations, like average talk time, time spent in unavailable statuses, service level and speed of answer by team. Staying true to its core as a cloud-native platform, Talkdesk has also helped SICOM agents successfully work from anywhere, anytime. When the company moved into a new building that required a new HVAC system, SICOM was able to send all agents home for two days without any disruption in the services they provide to customers. “That’s the beauty of Talkdesk — your agents can be in other, sometimes remote, locations and we don’t have to worry about whether they’ll be able to do their jobs — and that’s a huge bonus for us,” said Zarzeka.
Mike is working with Talkdesk to build a custom communication tool that sends automated calls to store managers based on their contact records in Salesforce. This functionality will help SICOM deliver time-sensitive information to managers no matter the time of day. He is confident Talkdesk will help drive customer experience innovation at SICOM. “We expect that Talkdesk will continue to raise the bar on the next generation of customer interactions.”