The Customer is a large snack meal and coffee delivery company in Athens, Greece. It started as a small sandwich outlet in 1972 and today it operates more than 200 stores in 4 countries, serving more than 200,000 customers daily.

As the business grew and stores opened all around Greece, the Customer faced the challenge of improved operation control nationwide.

The booming business encountered several operational issues:

• there was no central control of the customers’ activity and orders,
• most customers would call the local store manager on his/her mobile phone to order,
• peak hours (7:00 to 10:00 am) presented a serious challenge for the even distribution of orders and deliveries,
• the small average cost of order (5-10€) meant that keeping a tight shop was crucial for the viability of the company.

The stores’ sizes (from small stands to large 24/365 outlets) and locations (inside other stores, malls, train stations, airports etc.) all over the country, also presented a challenge regarding the available means of interconnection (landlines, mobile phones, poor data connectivity).

The company decided that a centralized ordering system was necessary, so as to:

• optimize delivery routes,
• distribute orders evenly among local stores to optimize performance,
• track customer and store activity to provide insight for workloads, provisions and staffing,
• to control and evaluate store performance.

Since most of the ordering was performed over the phone, Exelysis Contact Center offered the ideal solution to the problem of managing all those different voice connections. 

The implementation:

• All stores were integrated into the system as agents - regardless of the communication means used (landline, GSM, VoIP).
• A central phone number was adopted and advertised, directing all customer calls to an IVR application; this application was specifically designed to interoperate with the Customer’s Geographic Information System, providing, to the calling party, store proximity information and availability.
• A small call center consisting of 2-5 people (depending on traffic) was developed inside the Customer’s HQ, to perform a short customer data collection (name, phone number, address). The purpose was to pinpoint the customer’s location and resolve situations where the phone number was not enough to automatically pinpoint him/her. 

The result:

• 95% of the customer calls are identified as per the delivery address (after initial registration). The call is immediately redirected to the appropriate store (based on proximity and availability).
• Call failures (a common issue due to the variety of the stores’ telephony resources) are handled by the system and redirected to another eligible store upon severe failure. So, customer frustration and order losses are minimized.
• A disaster recovery service (fully automated) is provided from a private cloud facility with a dedicated server; the central phone number is redirected in case of failure of the central infrastructure and/ or telecom link, in order to provide temporary, fully automated customer service.

The centralized control that Exelysis offered, boosted effectiveness of customer servicing and minimized costs greatly, especially in peak traffic management and delivery resources.

• Several months after the new centralized system started operating, the customers expressed confidence and the Customer recorded improved results in the operation of the stores network.
• Furthermore, the centralized call center offered the customers the chance to communicate directly with the company; that, resulted to a better overall customer satisfaction and better handling of problematic situations.
• Along with the automation offered by the centralized call center, Exelysis gives visual representations of communication errors and store availability. This advantage means that the Customer can manually intervene where temporary failures occur, in order to reconnect stores or address rerouting of the calls where necessary.
• Insights from the collected data (call records, order data and call recordings) are valuable to the Marketing and Operations departments. Based on such information the Customer can:

> further optimize the operation of the stores,
> dictate the needs for new additions to the stores’ network,
> provide more timely and accurate services to the customer.