4 Ways ice Contact Center Helped a Retailer Save Time and Money

For over 30 years, ComputerTalk has been helping organizations provide outstanding customer experiences.

ComputerTalk's ice Contact Center has delivered cost savings and productivity enhancements to organizations across the globe. One such organization is Bob Barker Company, America’s largest detention supplier.

When they transitioned their contact center to ice, the move simplified contact center processes, improved call quality, and saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a year. Read on to learn some of the ways Bob Barker was able to save time and money by transitioning to ice.

Eliminated On-Premises Infrastructure

Bob Barker had to manage and maintain ten on-premises servers and specialized phone hardware with the Cisco platform they were using before their move to ice Contact Center. They found the platform complicated to use and administer. Users had both softphones and hard phones, which they had to manually switch between if they wanted to work from home.

These complications disappeared when Bob Barker moved to ice. In addition to overall improvements in productivity and administration, the move allowed them to eliminate all ten servers in the data center.

The company calculated approximately $200,000 in cost savings over the course of a year.

Simplified Contact Center Operations

With Bob Barker’s previous solution, they had to contact a Cisco-certified contractor if they wanted to close a queue and occasionally still faced further complications after contacting the contractor. Reporting was a troublesome and time-consuming process – IT spent hours pulling files just to create reports that were at least a day old.

ice simplified Bob Barker’s contact center operations, support, and administration, saving an estimated 2.5 days of work per week in comparison to their previous solution. In the words of their IT Operations Lead, “The product is easy to use, easy to troubleshoot, and easy to administer. And when in doubt, easy to contact customer service on!”

When Bob Barker moved to ice, the transition “helped tremendously” with improved productivity, according to the IT Operations Lead. “The fact that our Customer Service Manager and Supervisors know how to add/remove people from queues and workgroups, run their own reports, and report their own issues to ComputerTalk helps to take IT out of the equation. That is a big time saver for them and for IT.”

Integrated with the CRM System

Beyond the complicated nature of their previous solution, Bob Barker had other pain points that caused them to seek out a new solution. One of these pain points was an unreliable CRM integration. Customer service agents had to manually pull up the account page from the in-house CRM whenever an interaction came in. Although a connection had initially been established between the system and Cisco, the connection broke so often that it wasn’t useful.

ComputerTalk integrated ice with Bob Barker’s homegrown CRM system to screen pop the customer account page to an agent as soon as a call comes in, saving them time spent on pulling up the database and locating records. The integration also improved the customer’s experience, as it minimized their wait time.

Improved Call Quality

Call quality was also an issue with Bob Barker’s previous solution. While Cisco blamed the carrier and the carrier blamed Cisco, Bob Barker’s customer service agents continued to complain about poor call quality and being unable to hear customers.

That all changed when Bob Barker moved to ice. Having a contact center that was native to the telephony platform removed call quality issues, enabling agents and customers to hear each other properly during calls and eliminating previous frustrations. 

Throughout its history, Bob Barker Company has remained committed to delivering service beyond expectations.

ComputerTalk is proud to contribute to this mission by providing an ice Contact Center that allows the organization to meet their customer service goals to the best of their ability. If you want to learn more about this contact center transformation, click here to read the full story.