Mothercare Case Study - "We don't need to train our agents to know that, only where to find that"

Mothercare Case Study

       “We don’t need to train our agents to know that,
                               only where to find that”

...I don’t think it’s anything we can imagine
taking away from the business
Sharon Millard
Customer Contact Manager, Mothercare

Fast Facts

Customer
Mothercare

Challenge
Improve customer services across
Mothercare’s key three sales channels –
the web, contact centre and in store. A
particular focus was reducing the time
taken to fulfil customer queries and allow
customers to serve themselves where
possible.

Information Solution
Three solutions aimed at each of the
channels based on Transversal’s core web
self service technology.

Benefits

   „„   Used by thousands of customers
        every day
   „„   Contact centre call volumes
        dramatically reduced as more
        customers serve themselves via
        the web
   „„   Breaking news delivered instantly
        across contact centre staff and to
        the customers via the website
   „„   Consistent up to date information
        available to agents
   „„   Insights into what questions
        customers are actually asking
        online

                                             Customer Background
Transversal took the time to support us
and really understood our needs. We held     Founded nearly 50 years ago, Mothercare is one of the UK’s most
workshops where Transversal educated         iconic retail brands. Synonymous with children and parenting,
us on how natural language search            the company has a reputation for specialism, quality, safety and
works and how we needed to structure         innovation. Mothercare has over 1,000 stores around the world and
and capture the information we wanted        its 2009 group sales were £723.6 million. The Mothercare Group also
to share with customers. And it wasn’t       encompasses leading toy retailer, Early Learning Centre (ELC).
just about listening to our management
– Transversal sat down with our contact      The company is passionate about offering customers a multi-channel
centre agents and shop staff to learn        shopping environment through retail stores, catalogues and the
about their jobs. The result was that new    internet. Delivering the highest level of customer service is at the
systems were taken up enthusiastically as    heart of this.
staff felt a great sense of ownership.

Sharon Millard,
Customer Contact Manager, Mothercare

The Challenge
 The retail market is amongst the most competitive in the world. The advent of new competition via the
 internet and other direct channels has increased pressure on traditional retailers to respond to changing
 customer needs. Mothercare Group believes its major business challenges are the need to differentiate in a
 crowded market across both online and traditional retail channels.

 Mothercare faced a number of challenges with its web channel, contact centre and access to appropriate
 information to serve customers in store.

 Feedback on its website, both directly and via focus groups, demonstrated that it wasn’t providing access
 to the right answers for queries, so customers were forced to call or email its contact centre. This was a
 source of frustration since the information was on the website but difficult to access quickly or easily. This
 put additional strain on agents, meaning that they were answering basic questions rather than providing
 answers to more complex customer service queries.

 Mothercare identified that it needed to reduce the lower value customer service calls and emails in order
 to support multi-channel expansion without impacting customer service. This was especially acute when
 it came to peaks in demand around Christmas, which are difficult to predict. An additional challenge was
 revealed in feedback from 100 Mothercare contact centre agents which showed they had to access too many
 systems to carry out their day to day jobs. Analysis showed they had to log onto ten internal web systems,
 plus an HTML content management system, which was reducing productivity, causing frustration and
 ultimately slowing response rates, as measured by contact centre key performance indicators (KPIs).

 Providing access to information in Mothercare’s third channel – its shops was driven by business imperatives.
 The multi-channel push led to the launch of the major Collect in Store initiative, where customers could
 order via web or telephone and pick up at their local Mothercare. The business case was built on ensuring
 that shop staff had immediate access to customer order tracking – where they were and other relevant
 information. Mothercare identified that its staff were having to call the contact centre for updates and this
 was slowing down the process and was impacting on customer service – as the customer had to wait for
 information.

Implementation
The Transversal solution was implemented on time and to budget in the following stages:

The Solution
 Mothercare turned to self-service technology specialist Transversal to address all three channels; the web,
 contact centre and in store. The company had already worked with Mothercare’s colleagues at the Early
 Learning Centre on a separate web project and earned rave reviews, both for the strength of its natural
 language search technology and its knowledge in tailoring it to individual needs. Transversal addressed
 each of the channels sequentially, as follows:

 For consumers

 Mothercare launched a major refresh of its website in October 2008. This gave it the opportunity to introduce
 self-service. To match the tone of the site and to appeal to its target markets, Mothercare worked with
 Transversal to develop Ask Carrie, an online persona with a complex and intelligent knowledgebase sitting
 behind ‘her’. Research showed that Carrie was an image that customers identified with, making her a trusted
 ambassador for Mothercare and a guide to the information they needed. Ask Carrie provides fast answers to
 customer questions based on natural language search – it understands the context of the question to deliver
 the right information.

 For contact centre staff

 The Transversal solution was then extended to the contact centre and Ask Mothercare, a web-enabled
 solution was created to provide access to all systems from a consistent interface. Ask Mothercare shared the
 consistent knowledgebase of Ask Carrie but added more detailed information than was publically available,
 such as fluctuations in product prices, PDFs of product instructions and store information. This empowered
 Mothercare agents with the information they needed to excel at their jobs, right at their fingertips.

 For in store staff

 The final stage of the roll out saw Transversal create a tailored interface for the use of staff that enabled
 them to access the knowledgebase from tills through a simplified, low bandwidth interface focused on their
 needs. Before Transversal created the in store version, Mothercare was circulating by email a daily excel
 spreadsheet to all stores that was used to look up the status of all outstanding customer orders. Transversal
 developed a system that allows Mothercare’s fulfilment team to upload this file and automatically convert
 it to searchable content. Through the In Store visitor site, employees can then search for any customer
 order by order number and/or customer surname. This brings up all the information that was found in the
 spreadsheet within the same interface.

Because the answers are all there and they’re so easy      It’s a one stop shop for all Mothercare queries and
to find, I haven’t had to go and ask anyone to give me     questions, a quick and simple support tool for all to
the answer. I use it mainly for finding supplier details   use and enhances the customer experience.
and when it’s quiet I can catch up on the CSC news.
                                                           Gemma Purser
Sarah Lewis                                                Team Manager, 6 months service
4 weeks service - 1st week solo on phones

Results                                                         For the contact centre
The solution has been highly successful across                  The implementation of Ask Mothercare has seen
all three channels.                                             the retailer benefit in terms of productivity, morale
                                                                and overall customer service. For example, 100% of
 For consumers                                                  emails are now answered within 24 hours.

 Customers are currently asking thousands of                    Ask Mothercare went live in July 2009 and
 question s per day using Ask Carrie with only 3.5%             agent satisfaction surveys and feedback were
 needing to escalate queries. Since its launch it has           overwhelmingly positive. Agents have better first
 answered over 600,000 questions. Emails and calls to           contact resolution, contacts per transaction have
 the Mothercare contact centre have greatly reduced,            gone down and outbound calls have reduced. Call
 allowing staff to concentrate on answering more                length has increased, as more complex queries
 complex queries. The solution also allows Mothercare           are being dealt with, leading to a more rewarding
 to monitor for larger issues – for example if 50% of           working experience for staff. Inbound email volumes
 questions are on a specific topic, such as delivery            have decreased significantly, against a background of
 queries, there may be problems with a specific carrier         growing sales. This represents a workload reduction
 that it needs to investigate.                                  across the team, alongside other productivity gains
                                                                that are difficult to quantify given the expanding
 Ask Carrie has been an important contribution to the           nature of Mothercare’s business.
 overall business. Of Mothercare’s UK sales, 18.5% are
 now delivered through direct channels and overall              The time it takes to train new agents has also been
 direct sales increased by 25.5% in 2009. Direct sales          reduced and enabled newer team members to gain
 make up £107.3m of 2009’s Group sales of £723.6                confidence more quickly as they have a broad base
 million.                                                       of information at their fingertips.

 Given the transparent nature of Transversal’s
 technology, Mothercare now has complete visibility
 into how customers use it. Consequently it can
 identify complaints or even smaller issues before              For in store staff
 they become larger. These are resolved through
 agent intervention and are flagged to ensure that any          In store, feedback has been equally impressive. Since
 trends are picked up and action is taken. Mothercare           its introduction, calls to the in store helpline have
 does not view these as complaints, more as feedback            dropped in real terms as store staff are able to get
 that it can use to make customer service better.               fast, consistent answers through the system and
                                                                improve the customer experience of Collect in Store.

Future plans
Transversal is viewed by Mothercare as an enabler              Additionally, the use of Transversal also covers
for future opportunities. As part of its growth plans          Mothercare’s sister brand, Early Learning Centre. Since
Mothercare is integrating customer service with its            the acquisition of ELC in April 2007 the group strategy of
social media strategy. Mothercare is now on Facebook           ‘two brands: one engine’ has been delivered in bringing
and Twitter and has its own blog whilst launching the          together the knowledge management strategy using a
Gurgle parenting community. Mothercare plans to refer          single solution. It unifies the success of Mothercare and
comments from the blog and Gurgle through to Ask               ELC’s customer service with a single information engine
Carrie, ensuring consistent, fast answers. Given the real      underpinning the two distinct brands and operations.
time, detailed nature of social media, it is also using this   Thus best practice is shared between business units,
feedback to grow and tune its knowledgebase.                   and the benefits of Transversal’s technology are applied
                                                               across the group.
International growth is another of Mothercare’s key
business objectives. Ask Carrie will support this as it        Mothercare acquired maternity wear brand Blooming
can be easily translated into other languages, offering        Marvellous in July 2010. It is expected that the benefits of
a consistent self help tool and helping international          the Transversal solution will be further extended across
partners maximise customer service and revenues.               the latest addition to the Mothercare Group.

Transversal Ltd
Betjeman House
104 Hills Road
Cambridge, CB2 1LQ

Tel: +44 (0)1223 488 700
Fax: +44 (0)1223 488 701

www.transversal.com