Building trade and DIY supplier Toolstation is currently in its quiet time; peak period is September through to the first couple of weeks of December, before everyone clocks off for the festive break. This means the firm is currently fielding around 30,000 customer contacts a week, compared to around 50,000 during the busiest period. About 66% of these contacts are via the phone channel, with the rest distributed across email and web chat.
Of the 5,000 Toolstation staff, 55 people work in the contact center managing these tens of thousands of weekly contacts. But that number roughly quadrupled during recent years as the retailer's legacy technology setup struggled to keep up with growing demand from customer calls.
During the pandemic, Toolstation was able to get a limited click and collect service in place early on for customers. While this did the retailer wonders as a business, it wasn't such a positive experience for the contact center in terms of managing the associated surge in traffic.
Many of the phone calls during that period were simple queries, for example checking if a store was open. But just from growth in those basic questions, Toolstation went from having 15,000 calls a week to practically melting the switchboard as there were about 80,000 people trying to call the retailer in the space of just one day. Jason Gratton, Contact Center Operations Manager at Toolstation, says:
The contact center grew proportionally with that and at one point we were up to nearly 220 heads, which is just not sustainable. We had to have a re-think.
At the time, Toolstation was running multiple systems in its call center, including in-house systems, separate web chats, separate telephony systems and a separate place to house the guides for the team. Gratton notes:
It was very, very fragmented in terms of the ways of working; very, very complicated for the team. And when you're trying to rapidly onboard people, it's very difficult to train them as well, you've got to go to this place for this thing, this place for that thing. It all just became unmanageable.
The organization realized it was time to take a step back and look at how to run its call center properly, and consolidate the channels effectively into something more streamlined and easier to handle for the agents.
Toolstation went out to a tender process, and considered a number of solutions, everything from bigger players like Salesforce to smaller vendors and everything in between. The firm eventually settled on Freshdesk, which it felt represented the best value for the technology that was available.
Another reason for choosing Freshdesk was because it works with other platforms in use at Toolstation. The company is now part of the Travis Perkins group, which is a Google user, and the firm uses Peopleware for workforce management, which both work well with Freshdesk.
The retailer is now in the fourth year of using Freshworks technology, with Freshchat and Freshcaller running alongside Freshdesk.
Prior to the Freshworks rollout, the retailer was running two separate chat platforms: one for its app, and one for its website, because the two systems weren't compatible with each other. The Intercom system just provided the chat element for Toolstation, while MaxContact also provided its telephony solution.
To get ready for the switch from those two separate systems to Freshchat, Toolstation decided to keep things very simple in the first instance. Gratton explains:
To start with, it was to replicate the current ticket system that we have, which was very basic. That was an in-house managed ticket system through our own Extranet. It was to replicate that in the most basic form so that the team were able to then continue to open tickets for customers.
In terms of the telephony, that was also very basic to start off with, and Toolstation opted to migrate its existing telephony provider into Freshdesk via the bring your own carrier format. In Freshdesk, two options are available for telephony: you can use the Twilio network, which Freshdesk works with; or you could bring in your own vendor. Gratton adds:
Because we had an existing contract and an existing partnership and also things set up like DTMF [Dual Tone Multi Frequency] for taking payments over the phone, it was easier for us to stay with that vendor. The guys are using the Freshcaller interface and it's nice and works, and behind the scenes we use our own vendor to power that. That's a really good solution because that enabled us to transition with a few SIT [Systems Integration Testing] migrations and a few bits of telephony routing.
On the chat side, the retailer started with just live chat and no chat bot, routing it through to the agents, which allowed the business to get up and running pretty quickly. Gratton adds:
The chat bot is one thing where it's been great from a Freshdesk perspective because we have managed to configure all of that ourselves inside of the system. We haven't had an IT dev have to look at this, or have to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds getting something configured. We've got something that works really well for our logged-in users. We were able to configure it entirely within the contact center team as well.
The technology only took a few weeks to get up and running. Toolstation started to reap some benefits after three months, and then that ramped up six months in. Gratton notes:
Our customer response times have improved massively. We have gone from having some pretty horrendous wait times where customers could wait on the phone for over an hour potentially to getting back to customers within five minutes. If you send an email, we get back to you within 24 hours. We've gone from being able to answer very little of our calls, less than 50%, to answering the vast majority of the calls now.
As well as reducing the wait time for the customer, the firm is also seeing a reduction in staff costs. Contact center employees reached around 220 at one point, which Gratton notes was unsustainable for the business. Since running Freshworks, the retailer has been able to reduce this to 55, while offering huge improvements in customer wait times. The chat bot is also helping reduce the burden on staff, dealing with around 68% of queries from logged-in customers. He adds:
That's not sending customers on a journey, that is genuinely resolving the query that they've come here to ask for. Where we want to try and make some gains on that going forward is for the non-logged-in customers and that is our focus for the second half of this year and next year.
In terms of automations, Toolstation currently has 542 automations running, from moving and assigning tickets, to responding to customers where appropriate, which led to somewhere in the region of £300,000 saved.
From a retention perspective, staff turnover before the Freshworks rollout was around 40%; it's at 18% now. Gratton adds:
That is pretty much unheard of for a contact center. It's really, really low. That's been a massive benefit. The colleagues rate Freshdesk 4.7 out of five, they absolutely love it , especially those guys that were with us before. The bars look a little bit like social media down the side, so it's very easy for them to work. They're able to do little things like customize the order of stuff themselves. If you walk around the office and you're looking at Freshdesk screens, none of them look exactly the same because the agents have dragged the icons around and moved the little apps that go into the sidebar to the places that they want them."
For other businesses considering a similar project, Gratton shared a useful tip: don't roll out multiple products all at once. Toolstation opted to install Freshcaller, Freshchat and Freshdesk in one go over the space of a couple of weeks. He notes:
We should have split it out into a few parts. It probably would've been better for us to just start with Freshdesk and build upon that a little bit, and then add in the caller and the chat a little bit later. It put a lot of pressure on the team, a lot of pressure on delivery. If you imagine day one from being handed the keys to a Ferrari and I used to have a VW Beetle, and now I've got all these things and I don't know what it is, what it does, what the context is. Once you've explored those admin options and explored some of the things that you can do, what happened was an explosion of ideas, maybe a little bit of scope creep.
The combined rollout also led to pressure on the agents around training, as while the project resulted in moving them from three products to one, they felt there were still three things to be trained on and not one system. Gratton says:
From training and breaking it down to the agents, it would've been better if we had trained them on Freshdesk then Freshchat and Freshcaller, although for Caller and Chat, I don't think it matters which way around you do it. My recommendation would definitely be to start with Freshdesk if anybody was doing it from scratch.
Toolstation is now planning to take advantage of some of the recent advancements in the product, such as some of the actions in the Freddy copilot. He says:
What it means for us is being able to make API calls and do things for the customer rather than just answer a question for them. If a customer says, I want to change the address on my account, for example, we could action that via an API call.
The firm also wants to improve natural language AI for non-logged-in users, to make it feel more personalized, and have very recently started to look at voicebots. Gratton notes:
Because 66% of our traffic is over the phone, so AI is great at doing emails and things like that, but it's not hitting our core user base right now.
Toolstation is exploring voicebots for pre-screening some of the call, confirming some of the data protection actions, which could potentially save 30-45 seconds per call. It could then still be handed over to a human to do the job, and the agent would be provided with a summary and of that pre-screening information as the call comes through so they could get straight to business with the customer.
Stock checks and product enquiries are another potential option. Gratton says:
