Viewing customer care through a new lens: Scrivens changes the game with Avaya

Scrivens Opticians and Hearing Care is prized for its fantastic customer service at a local, personalized level. Founded over 80 years ago, the family-owned and operated optician and hearing care specialist now supports over 180 branches across England with plans for further expansion—all while maintaining the core values on which the company was built. People are at the heart of Scrivens’ business model. The ability to provide personal service based on individual requirements and preferences is at the heart of all innovation plans.

Critical to the company’s vision is stable, scalable and sustainable growth that enables Scrivens to deliver experiences that matter. This means maintaining high-quality phone service for customers calling to book appointments, obtain advice or discuss service issues, even when staff are busy caring for customers in-store. It means securely expanding while preserving the local feel and human touch that has garnered Scrivens respect and admiration through the decades. Ultimately, it means finding the right technology partner who understands their mission and shares in their customer values.

Avaya heard them loud and clear (see what we did there?). Puns aside, we offered the proficiency and product value for Scrivens to seamlessly, securely and cost-effectively grow while continuing to deliver on its promise of fantastic service and clinical excellence. Here’s how…

Eliminating the Dreaded Wait

Companies need to go beyond minimization to fully eliminate long wait times. This was a key concern for Scrivens in its quest to grow—delivering value to greater communities—while maintaining the quality of service its brand was best known for. A few years ago, the company noticed some roadblocks in its ability to answer calls in a timely manner. Those obstacles eventually turned into barricades that prevented the company from delivering care in the ways its customers needed and expected.

Scrivens’ IT Director David Hewitson shared his vision behind the development:

“If branches were tied up or calls weren’t answered within just a few rings, we wanted them to be automatically rerouted to our contact center. We needed to ensure calls would be answered quickly, intelligently and attentively, no matter how busy a branch was.”

Research shows that all it takes is waiting on hold for one minute for almost 60% of customers to hang up when calling a company. We wanted to take Scrivens above and beyond, so we made it our shared goal to connect every store branch to a central contact center so that all calls would be answered within 20 seconds flat.

Scrivens’ existing system couldn’t intelligently connect all branches to the contact center in this way. The company needed an adaptable and integrative system that was easy to use for the company’s 1000+ staff, while doing the legwork of connecting every branch to a central contact center for improved response time. Also of interest was the ability to integrate additional communication channels like email and Web chat to expand customer care on their terms. “We wanted to take things one step at a time, but we understand the importance of having multiple, dynamic forms of communication for customer engagement and satisfaction,” Hewitson explained.

Avaya IP Office™ Server Edition turned out to be the perfect fit for Scrivens. The system could seamlessly connect the entire company to a central contact center with integrated UC capabilities to support more sophisticated customer interactions when they were ready. And with support for cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployments, IP Office empowered Scrivens with the ability to migrate from one to the other when the time was right.

Demolishing Downtime

The top factor in Scrivens’ decision-making was reliability. “With thousands of calls a day, downtime is not a word in our vocabulary. We hadn’t gone for full IP in the past due to concerns around scalability and failure. We have had outages in the past,” Hewitson explained. As the brand grew, it needed a solution that would deliver instant failover if any element in the call flow failed.

Together with NT Voice and Data Solutions, Avaya curated a continuity approach that provided Scrivens with this much-needed assurance. The approach was carefully implemented and delivered outstanding results. We checked in with Scrivens one year after system deployment to learn that Avaya IP Office was delivering the reliability and redundancy the company needed for sustainable, long-term growth.

"Multiple levels of protection have been built into the system to eliminate any single point of failure" Hewitson explained. "Our main SIP routing incorporates 3 levels of failover, 2 of which are fully automatic and we have a backup Avaya IP Office Server on permanent standby. In the case of a local branch broadband outage the Avaya system automatically diverts calls to the contact center levels with no potential loss of business. Now, we’re approaching zero lost calls.”

Scrivens also amplified its communications infrastructure using Avaya IP Office Contact Center, enabling agents to resolve inquiries quickly and with greater personalization at the individual account level. Specifically, the company introduced skills-based routing—a core element of IP Office Contact Center—to pair customers with the right subject matter expert enterprise-wide, turning the contact center into a revenue-generator. The result: an increase in number of sight tests, contact lens and hearing appointment bookings at a lower operational cost.

Continuing a Legacy of Excellence

In an age defined by business closure, it’s clear Scrivens is doing something right. The company is rooted in service excellence and will continue that legacy with Avaya’s technology foundation, all while enjoying competitive cost benefits. “Even with the initial capital expenditure, we estimate that three years from now we’ll be saving money compared to what we were spending before,” Hewitson said. “Other providers could have offered us something similar, but not at the same cost.”

Don’t make a spectacle of yourself (we couldn’t resist one more).
Learn more about Avaya IP Office and IP Office Contact Center here.