Customer Success
The Scotts Company and Talkdesk Bring Spring to Customer Service
By Gavin Gustafson
0 min read
“April showers bring May flowers”
This old standby slogan for spring starts popping up – like dandelions – around this time every year. Someone will make the quip if they overhear you complaining about the rain. You can be sure the local TV personality, who specializes in weather-guessing, will repeat it ad nauseam as a way to beg forgiveness for suggesting you go play golf because it would be “a pretty nice little Saturday”… But, while there is certainly some logic behind the phrase, one thing is for certain; April rain may help flowers breed, but May is the month for weeds. It’s lawncare season!
Another phenomenon that occurs each year as a result of the productive relationship between April and May is the exponential increase in customers at your local home improvement store. Just the other evening I stopped by on my way home to pick up some items to help my lawn recover from its winter hibernation, but was disappointed to find that my preferred products were sold out. I checked with customer service desk to see when they would have more and after a quick call to their supplier, The Scotts Company, I knew to return the next day. Thanks to the friendly in-store customer service, and the quick assistance the store received from Scotts, I wouldn’t have to visit a different, less conveniently located store and could stop by on my way home the next day.
Scotts recently left their legacy, on-premises contact center system and moved to Talkdesk Enterprise Contact Center Platform to support their customer service operations. The primary reason for the move was their past system’s inability to quickly and easily scale services up and down to meet their fluctuating seasonal needs. That 3-minute call at the store’s customer service desk may have taken 10-15 minutes last spring. This improvement positively affected their business by keeping me as a customer.
“We were looking for a solution with the flexibility to scale with seasonal demand, offered seamless integration to Google, included advanced reporting and was very easy to use,” said Brent Hiltscher, Manager of Unified Communications at The Scotts Company, “Talkdesk matched our needs and are working with us to enable even more of our unique requirements. They really listen.”
Talkdesk and strategic partner Billow, a business development firm that specializes in cloud-based software, workflow optimization, reporting and analytics, implemented the platform in only two months after Scotts made the decision to change vendors.
The debate of cloud versus premises-based contact center solutions is nearly over, and the cloud’s flexibility is a key part of that conclusion. The question of “Why Enterprises Are Moving Contact Centers to the Cloud” has been answered. For many customer service providers the question now is, “Which cloud platform should I chose?” A key differentiator in this case for Talkdesk, a second-generation cloud provider, was ease-of-use, ability to customize and implementation speed.
"Our agents have already started using Talkdesk, the online training has enabled faster and easier agent ramp time. Our call center supervisors are now able to control the system by making updates that instantly address the needs of our customers. We’re always looking to improve our customer experience, and Talkdesk lets us do that very quickly and easily."
Teresa Erwin, Manager of Call Center Operations at The Scotts Company
As The Scotts Company knows, customers value positive brand experience now more than ever before. According to a 2018 report conducted by PwC, three-quarters of global respondents say that a positive experience is among the key drivers that influence their brand loyalties. In fact, the price premium for quality CX among consumers worldwide is up to 16 percent on products and services. The report goes on to say that most consumers would stop doing business with a company due to lack of knowledge and unfriendly service. Speed, efficiency, knowledge, convenience and quality customer service are so valued by today’s consumer that most are willing to pay more for it.
Is your contact center as efficient and effective as it should be? As the first-generation clouds of April lift and give way to the second-generation flowers of May, the weather prognosticators predict bright sunny days for the future of customer service.
Request a demo of the Talkdesk Enterprise Contact Center Platform
