Fast cloud rollout supports personalised customer service

Procurement. Simple. Fast. Comprehensive. That’s the customer promise of the Conrad Sourcing Platform, which offers products and services for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers online. The company also operates 19 branches throughout Germany and has subsidiaries in 16 European countries.

Conrad Electronic is one of the leading omnichannel providers for convenient, one-stop shopping of electronic components. It provides technical basics, special applications or tailor-made solutions. With 6 million product offerings from leading manufacturers, private brands and professional services, technical and electronic users can find whatever they need to meet their operations requirements.

A focus on personalised service

In addition to customised e-procurement solutions, B2B customers receive personal support and service from key account managers, inside sales agents and business consultants located at the company’s branches. But company officials believe a well-functioning platform economy requires more than just machines; it needs people, too. Customers know and trust that they’ll have access to people who understand their needs and who will support and simplify the buying process.

To offer this level of personalised support, the company operates an efficient and fully staffed contact centre. Inquiries are centralized at the headquarters and then segmented, routed and processed via inbound channels according to B2B customers and end users.

In March 2020, Conrad Electronic faced the challenge of maintaining its excellent customer service during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite a lockdown and closed offices. As a technology pioneer, the company began its digital transformation early on. After the pandemic began, it only took three days to enable 99% of its employees at headquarters to begin working remotely. However, the company still needed an innovative solution to manage customer service.

“We had to solve a lockdown challenge in a hurry,” said Olaf Koller, a colleague at the service provider NTT. It quickly became clear that the existing on-premises telephone system Conrad Electronic was using couldn’t meet user needs in the short timeframe needed without limitations — even when running in turbo mode. After a short market analysis and evaluation phase, the company selected Genesys Cloud.

No time to hesitate

The system integration was quick and the few technical challenges teams encountered were easily overcome. Previously, all incoming calls were centrally routed to the respective agents using the Telekom intelligent network, regardless of the agents’ location. Routing was designed to be highly customer-oriented and based on preset rules. So, the teams wanted to replicate this with the Genesys Cloud platform. This wasn’t a problem for NTT experts.

“We were able to implement a test setup in the NTT cloud in just a few days. This meant that the first customer inquiries could be successfully processed immediately,” reported Koller.

Once the proof of concept worked in turbo mode, Conrad Electronic switched to the Genesys Cloud platform with the entire inbound service. The company gave all agents in a home office or other mobile environment computers and headsets; they also were briefly trained on Genesys Cloud.

All agents work in the cloud platform and answer calls for regions of Germany and Austria. The optimised routing rules for customer contacts are completely mapped in the platform.

“We had to act fast due to the pandemic and are very pleased with both the scalability and the flexibility of the solution. Our long-standing partner NTT has performed quite well,” said Günther Oberhofer, Director IT Communication and Networks at Conrad Electronic.