In a day and age where instant gratification has become an expectation, consumers demand responses to their questions and concerns quickly, if not immediately, and businesses know that excellent customer service is vital to their long-term success. Luckily, technology is evolving with the times, and the digital revolution and AI are helping to completely reimagine call centers.
Camping World, the number one retailer of recreational vehicles (RVs) globally, understands that providing exceptional customer service is vital to remaining ahead of its competition. The business relies heavily on its contact centers to deliver unmatched customer service, but following the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in customers revealed some issues in its existing infrastructure. As the volume and traffic increased, gaps within agent management and response times became more prominent.
“We are a unique business where we serve three very distinct sets of customers who are into the RV lifestyle (life on the road). There’s the retail side, financial services like insurance or goods, and the dealership side,” explains Saurabh Shah, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Camping World. “We have a decently-sized call center, but I can’t have one agent meeting the needs of each of the three different business units. That creates significant complexities in staffing up our call centers.”
Shah also explains that pulling agents from one area of the business and placing them in another takes training, and Camping World didn’t have the time to conduct such training before the seasonal surge came—especially during the pandemic labor shortage. Not having a 24x7 call center was a longstanding issue even in the off-season. When customers could not reach a human agent, their questions and queries either went unnoticed, were pushed off until the next day when a representative could respond or were accidentally dropped entirely. That left Camping World’s sales team with no visibility into the number of leads accumulated in the off-hours.
“Our response times were concerning. Customers were waiting a long time, which was tied to a couple of things,” says Brenda Wintrow, Senior Vice President (SVP) of Sales and Customer Experience at Camping World. “It was obviously volume, but not having clear visibility into their performance and response time along with the number of chats they could maximize was an issue.”
With its customers unable to reach a live human agent during call center off-hours, the retailer was forced to rethink its infrastructure, its lack of visibility and its functionality gaps. With customer interactions as the focal point, Camping World looked to IBM® Consulting to modernize its contact centers and invest in a new infrastructure to improve processes and workflow automation.