International retailer Leroy Merlin, with a presence in 15 countries, has invested in a cloud-based customer experience platform designed to complement its physical retail stores.

The retailer has nearly 100 years of experience.

Leroy Merlin executive Dmitriy Anderson says the future of retailing will be driven by a harmonised hybrid of physical stores as well as a highly effective digital platform to ensure a better customer experience.

“We wanted to retain a compelling bricks and mortar presence. But we also wanted to be strong in the digital space,” says Anderson. “The solution was to introduce a world-class, cloud-based digital customer satisfaction system.”

The tools to achieve this were delivered by global cloud-based contact centre solutions provider Five9 in partnership with local technology integrator Jasco Enterprise.

Anderson says the new platform has transformed how Leroy Merlin interacts with its customers, delivering quality measurement and reporting tools.

‘Eliminated guesswork’

He says before the digital customer engagement platform was installed, Leroy Merlin did not have reliable measurement tools.

“We have eliminated guesswork in terms of understanding customer sentiment to our offering,” says Anderson. “We can now measure proper customer satisfaction, not based on what we think or feel but actual feedback from customers. We noticed a rapid increase in customer satisfaction from September when we deployed the system.”

The system was installed shortly after the announcement of the Jasco and Five9 partnership.

The professionalism and knowledge of the Five9 implementation team ensured that the contact centre system was enabled and tested in a short space of time. The pre-built integration of Zendesk into the Five9 platform aided in the rapid deployment of the solution and is already showing impressive results.

Anderson says before Five9 and Jasco came onboard, customer satisfaction was around 60%. “Within a short period, this has jumped to about 75%, which is remarkable,” he says, adding that that the previous system was narrow in focus and hopelessly inefficient.

“With the new cloud-based platform, we have the freedom to be customer ambassadors literally from anywhere,” he says.

Anderson says he is particularly pleased with the impact the harmonisation of digital elements and ground stores has had on business growth.

The new hybrid dispensation has also had a considerable influence on improving the office environment. “All entities of the business are now working in support of one another instead of playing territorial games.

“We broke down the silos and we are all working together with C-level executives sitting side by side with other employees of the business from top to toe. At Leroy Merlin, we do not have an open-door policy because we do not have doors.”

Harmonised

The new, harmonised operating environment has also brought financial benefits. “Financial gains from the use of the new system include cost savings from installation to operational costs,” says Anderson.

“We are doing more today with only 16 agents than we ever got from the 60 agents that were assigned to the same function previously.”

Jasco Enterprise executive Andre Schoeman says the ease of implementation of the Leroy Merlin contact centre is the kind of service experience that Five9 customers enjoy worldwide.

“Together with Five9, we have been able to deliver a platform that is cloud-based, secure, robust and reliable,” says Schoeman. “Jasco only partners with platform providers that deliver superb service and excellent value. With this implementation, Five9 certainly proved that they are the global leader in cloud contact centres.”