Omnicus helped elevate the customer experience to new heights at Maxbo

With its 1,600 employees, stretching from Mandal in the south to Trondheim in the north, Maxbo is one of Norway's most prominent DIY chains designed for the construction industry and consumers. Maxbo’s contact center handles all the dialogue with their customers, spanning from voice, live chat, email, and social media.

For a long time, Maxbo had managed their contact center by using several different software vendors. But as the chain became more prominent and the customer base grew, Maxbo experienced that the solution did not scale well enough to deliver market-leading customer service and experience.

Unnecessarily complex and complicated

Maxbo’s contact center has expanded during the last few years. From initially having contact with their customers using voice to being available through email, social media, and live chat in addition. Maxbo’s challenge was that new solutions were procured every time a new touchpoint was established. And the fact that the solutions did not communicate with each other, did only add to the increasing complexity.

At most, Maxbo used four different solutions to handle the communications with their customers. Maxbo realized that something had to be done to give both the employees and Maxbo's customers a better overall user experience.

Maxbo also had to use some of their team leaders' time to manually manage the resources scheduled to work in the various channels throughout the day. And with great variety and different needs, which often change quickly during a working day, team leaders sometimes had to spend unnecessarily much time allocating resources.

The fear of not being able to answer customers within acceptable waiting times, which could lead to employees feeling that they were unable to deliver according to expectations, was decisive for Maxbo's conclusion that it was time to rethink their approach towards customer service. At a minimum, the contact center needed to be able to handle all the different ways a customer could reach out for help. In addition, Maxbo wanted a solution that would allocate resources automatically and would help team leaders to free up time to better develop and look after their employees.

Nothing to lose. Everything to win

The decision was to cut down from their four different software vendors and choose just one who could consolidate all customer interactions into a single and unified platform across voice, live chat, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email. The vendor of choice was Omnicus.

After the decision was made and the solution was in place, Omnicus used the insights and reports to make the necessary changes regarding how Maxbo best would staff up its team. On top of that, the same insights were used to improve the different work processes. Maxbo’s challenge was no longer related to the solution, but to their employees.

It should not come as a surprise that by introducing new tools, new systems, and a new way of working, it can be experienced as demanding for the employees. That’s why coaching and training are imperative, to ensure a smooth transition.

For Maxbo, the transition turned out to be much smoother than first anticipated and feared.

A new and better everyday life for everyone

Today the whole team at the contact center has a far more efficient solution in place. A solution that is also very easy to use. After only two hours of training, Maxbo was up and running and "live". The transition from how difficult it used to be to search through previous customer dialogue, to a complete dashboard of all the different communication channels and conversations has quickly paid off. The improvements have impressed all of the different stakeholders, not to mention the team itself, who now have had a new and better working day.

The results speak for themselves:

• Maxbo went from having an average of 20 to 30 customers in a constant phone queue to zero.
• Missed calls have been reduced from 31 to only 10 percent.
• The average response time on the phone has been reduced by 96 percent. The response time is now, on average, only 18 seconds.
• Telco charges have been reduced by more than 50 percent month over month
• Written inquiries that the contact center manages to handle within a month, have increased by as much as 45 percent.
• The average response time to an email has been reduced from 5 days and 5 hours to just 1 hour and 21 minutes. The fastest initial response to an email can now be as little as just a few seconds.
• The contact center representatives say they now have a much better time to help the customer without feeling stressed.
• Customers are now happily surprised by how quickly the contact center representatives are able to answer their calls.

These are some of the numbers and results that will help Maxbo to further develop and build a stronger brand going forward. Looking at their current position and comparing that to only a short time ago, from the Customer Service Award 2021 review, Maxbo is now very well positioned for 2022 and onwards.

With the new solution in place, the team leaders have been able to free up more time to focus on managing and developing their employees. That time will also be used to let the customer service team engage in sales activities as well. The results so far are so positive that Maxbo has decided to create its own budget for this going forward.

And with the new reports and insights that Maxbo gets through Omnicus' solution, their team leaders are now able to quickly and easily visualize towards the management team, what the capacity of the contact center looks like per day, week, month and year.

Team leaders can also use the same insight to create valuable reports that go out to the respective department stores, where they can use this insight as means to creating an even better customer experience.