Transforming Customer Experience for a leading UK supermarket

At a glance

This retailer’s legacy on-premise contact centre was hampering business progress, with changes increasingly costly and slow to complete. Departments and brands within the group were using the technology differently and multiple contracts were in place making support increasingly difficult too. Its busy in-house IT team did not have the capacity to manage all the work and needed to re-focus on the strategic direction as opposed to ‘keeping the lights on’.

The Background

In 2023, following a successful tender, Maintel helped a leading UK supermarket group move its frontline customer contact centre from an on-premise solution to Genesys Cloud.

The transition aimed to drive service efficiency through smarter call routing and targeted deflection. It was also designed to foster innovation and flexibility, supporting remote working and managing demand peaks more cost‑effectively.

At the same time, the solution enhances the customer experience with shorter interactions powered by agent‑assist technology. Naturally, it also meets full PCI compliance and delivers granular security throughout.

The Challenge

The retailer then began to look at other ways it could use the Genesys Cloud solution to support internal and external customers and partners and evolve its customer-facing operation further.

However, it recognised that its internal engineering team was already working at capacity; it did not have in-depth existing knowledge of the Genesys portfolio, or the time to stay up to speed on new releases and feature enhancements that come with a CCaaS offering. It therefore agreed an innovative contract with Maintel for agile professional services – essentially a preallocated budget for such services, that the supermarket can use for whatever changes it needs to make or innovations it wishes to explore.

This proved invaluable from the outset but became even more important when the company made the strategic pivot to work with an outsourcer for (eventually) all aspects of its customer service operation.

The Solution

In under two years since the initial deployment, the Genesys Cloud solution Maintel originally deployed for the retailer has benefited from a series of enhancements, with a range of new capabilities brought onboard. Increasingly, these have focused on the strategic adoption of AI to streamline operations and drive performance, with benefits for the customer experience too.

Early changes included migrating a number of small contact centres that had been in operation for specific functions into Genesys Cloud, removing outdated or unsupported technology and
optimising overall support. This immediately created time and cost efficiencies. Maintel also introduced a security key rotation solution via the in-house development team, to help the retailer protect encrypted data. After assessing the enhancements available with a surveying module, Maintel recommended that the retailer should adopt that to strengthen its voice of the customer programme. This was added and has made a considerable difference to the depth and quality of customer feedback. Similarly, Maintel has helped the retailer introduce trial Genesys Agent Copilot, to provide agents with helpful customer information on screen during calls.

Internally, Maintel has helped the supermarket revamp its quality assessment, using capabilities within Genesys Cloud to track 60 days of data rather than 30 and monitor vital indicators around agent empathy and customer sentiment. Progress is being made towards tracking 100% of calls.

The solution has delivered excellent stability and performance, with key customer service metrics either maintained or improved – even during the supermarket’s strategic transition to BPO partnership. The Maintel team supported the transition, making necessary configuration changes to ensure that agents working from different locations were equipped and supported, while maintaining robust security controls. Post transition, Maintel and the retailer have worked closely to analyse performance data to ensure the outsourcer is performing optimally, that the cost base is carefully monitored and that CX remains paramount.

What are the benefits?

With Maintel’s guidance, the retailer quickly secured many of the benefits it sought from moving to CCaaS. The customer service operation became more efficient and flexible, and there are clear indicators of improvement. Thanks to smarter routing, issues can now be resolved faster, with many customer queries addressed through self-service or automated responses.

The in-call experience has been vastly enhanced by the adoption of a smart solution for identity verification (IDV) devised by Maintel to replace a third-party system. Maintel’s tool informs agents on-screen if the caller has already completed the IDV, so the agent does not need to repeat the process. This saves time on thousands of calls, delivering an efficiency saving of over £200,000 a year, as well as providing a better customer experience, by removing the frustration of having to go through the IDV process a second time.

Maintel is also using AI to provide even more valuable contextual data on screen, configuring Genesys Agent Copilot to search CRM systems for relevant insights during an interaction. For example, if a customer mentions a delivery query, the agent can receive details of any outstanding deliveries and previous communications about them. Again, this accelerates the call – agents don’t have to search the systems themselves – and provides a better experience for the customer.

Having learned that response rates to feedback requests were around 4-5%, Maintel proposed the introduction of enhanced surveys, with added gamification to incentivise agents to promote it. Since the solution went live, response rates have increased to almost 20% – equivalent to 1 in 5 callers completing the survey, compared to 1 in 25 previously. This gives the retailer far more data to inform its voice of the customer programme.

Maintel is also providing a range of additional support beyond the core professional services aspects of designing and implementing changes. Knowledge transfer to the retailer’s team means they can now make some of the more straightforward alterations to the Genesys suite without needing to use any of the allotted Maintel time, which can be saved for more complex changes. Quarterly review meetings offer an opportunity for Maintel to advise the retailer of opportunities for further improvement, such as, enabling capabilities built into the latest Genesys releases.