Native digital shopping by design

Handpicked style always on trend

Famed for its membership-based digital brands, TechStyleOS is the retail partner of choice for celebrities like Rihanna and Kate Hudson. Using a unique software engine, its website and eCommerce platform provide personalized experiences for more than 5 million online shoppers.

To propel the business forward, TechStyleOS sought to transform its global contact centers. Achieving those goals on a rigid NICE inContact setup was challenging. TechStyleOS found it difficult to integrate its CRM solution, bots and social channels — or offer new services. It was unable to roll back software changes and downtime became more frequent. And its quality assurance was resource-heavy — with little opportunity for real-time intervention.

“Our old NICE inContact solution was unstable, difficult to stand up and limited in scope for expansion,” said Jack Roberts, Director, GMS Technology and Applications at TechStyleOS. “In one quarter, our communications went down for over 24 hours on nine separate occasions. The reporting capabilities were very cumbersome and didn’t offer much call information or real-time statistics. In solving those issues, we also wanted the freedom to add channels without having to rely on professional services teams, or external developers or contractors.”

Ready to run in 45 minutes

Following an 18-month market-wide tender evaluating over 20 potential partners, TechStyleOS chose the Genesys Cloud platform. Its open APIs and simple integrations meant the company didn’t have to cease third-party contracts early and pay high cancellation fees. And the underlying Amazon Web Services (AWS) fabric solved all its stability problems.

“Right from our first meetings we saw Genesys shared our ambitions and drive for CX innovation,” added Roberts. “And how we wanted to more closely align our contact centers and agents with digital shopping trends and behaviors.”

Initially, TechStyleOS considered taking a phased approach to implementation, but the easy-to-use Genesys interfaces and provisioning tools meant a big global rollout took under 90 days — from contract signing to go-live. Users were off and running after 45 minutes of eLearning and training — in good time for the September peak season.

Easy to manage from a distance

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, TechStyleOS rapidly transitioned a global workforce to remote working. “I remember the day,” said Roberts. “It was a Sunday in Serbia and we switched everyone to home working overnight — and then did the same across all our offices. There’s no way we could have done that with our previous NICE inContact technology. In fact, as soon as we went live, our service-impacting incidents pretty much stopped overnight — and we saw a 90% improvement in uptime.”

Digital simplicity

The smart data layer and public APIs embedded in the Genesys Cloud platform connect critical systems and power new connections between applications. For example, now TechStyleOS can simply shift existing carrier services at no charge, which other vendor offerings couldn’t enable the company to do.

TechStyleOS has used AI for several years. “We don’t want to use our bots to replace live agents,” added Roberts. “It’s more about spotting situations where a customer can self-serve and reduce wait time. And then feed that time savings back so agents can hold richer, detailed conversations.”

Amazon Lex is expected to generate $250,000 in annual license savings. Set up in two days, a bot now frees human agents from dealing with member authentication, billing inquiries, order checks and similar routine tasks. Internally, Amazon Lex bots also support chat and social media message feeds, which incur high traffic volumes. “Along with a two-fold increase in self-service and chat deflection, we’ve found it’s much easier to conduct A/B testing of chatbot workflows with Amazon Lex,” said Roberts.

Before, the company would pay a voice recording artist through a retainer every time it needed to make an IVR change. “We’d have to write the message, translate it into different languages, arrange the recordings and then upload it into our call flows using Genesys Architect,” said Roberts. “Amazon Polly speech-to-text has been a revelation and we’re now able to make those changes faster ourselves.”

TechStyleOS is looking to gain control of data sources that currently sit with a third-party AI provider. One of the retailer’s main focuses is on transitioning to offer a voicebot in addition to its tech bot support.

“The integration of our chosen AI platform and Genesys made it an easy decision since we could build the bot without having to contract consultancy services,” said Roberts. “It also fits in nicely with what we are trying to do in Architect, which is that we don’t want the conversation to take place in the bot tool; we want it to sit in Architect. This gives us more control over the reporting and over the flows for specific intents.”

More resilience and flexibility for less

Combining AWS microservices with triple-active redundancy enables TechStyleOS to push new releases without fear. “Downtime used to be a weekly occurrence, but I couldn’t even tell you the last time we had an incident,” added Roberts. “In productivity terms alone, we believe we’ve saved nearly 2,000 hours.”

Maximizing uptime is especially important during fashion launches and busy sales periods. Plus, the number of users can be scaled up or down easily using a low-cost concurrent pricing model — generating significant savings.

Happier members and end users

Another quick win was the company’s virtual queue, which helps flatten demand curves. Entirely self-built, the system confirms why members are making contact, then offers a callback or redirects them to channels with the shortest queues.

In the past, the retailer would run a big promotion in a specific country, see demand spike and scramble to add resources. Inevitably, it missed out on business.

“Now, we don’t have those problems,” said Roberts. “In Europe, our abandonment rate has dropped by 31% and we’ve absorbed a 14% rise in inbound traffic without increasing headcount. That’s been helped by reductions in call and chat handling time of over a minute.”

And it’s not just member satisfaction that has improved. “Many of our agents work in BPO organizations around the world,” added Roberts. “We regularly do site visits and run focus groups. It used to take several hours to go through all their pain points and negative comments. Since moving to Genesys, most feedback is either aesthetical or around the tools we built internally. And we’re usually done in about 40 minutes.”

Innovation is always in fashion

TechStyleOS intends to replace its chat solution with Genesys Web Messaging, moving to asynchronous conversations in line with the kind of experiences members get through Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Other plans include introducing Genesys Predictive Engagement with predictive chat so that agents can identify the best time to engage with customers who browse the website.

“We’ve started to rethink our member and agent experience — and that has only been possible because of Genesys,” concluded Roberts. “The caliber of the people they assign to our account is one of the biggest benefits when it comes to cross-skilling and beta testing new ideas.”