Toolstation
Nasstar facilitated a rapid contact centre transformation for leading retailer, Toolstation, when Covid-19 struck. Read more about this customer success story.
To quickly adapt to a global pandemic by simultaneously enabling contact centre staff to work remotely and retain high levels of customer service via a hosted telephony and contact centre solution, whilst ensuring continuation of PCI DSS de-scope within the homeworker environment.
Services
Collaboration and Communication
Contact Centre Transformation
The Brief
Toolstation is one of Britain’s fastest-growing suppliers of tools, accessories and building supplies to the trade, home improvers and self-builders. With a multi-channel offering, Toolstation customers can buy online, at over 450 branches across the UK and through a dedicated UK contact centre.
When Covid-19 struck, Toolstation was forced to close its offices and the pressure was on to immediately deliver a solution that facilitated contact centre staff to work remotely and ensure they could effectively and efficiently manage a rapid influx of phone-based enquiries.
As a current Nasstar customer, Toolstation were already utilising Nasstar’s AgentPay to safeguard PCI-DSS compliance of payments processed over the phone, integrated with their existing on-premise telephony and contact centre solutions. However, this solution restricted staff to being in the office. Following the government’s Covid-19 guidance which advised businesses to implement a working from home policy where possible, Toolstation asked for Nasstar’s help to deliver a secure remote working solution at speed.
The Benefits
As a Managed Service Specialist skilled at transformational IT, Nasstar was able to replicate Toolstation’s on-premise solution with a more efficient hosted telephony and contact centre solution that could be accessed by its employees from the safety of their own homes. This provided Toolstation with the agility and flexibility needed to meet the governments working from home guidance, whilst ensuring that customer service and PCI compliance was maintained throughout.
The new hosted solution also delivered additional benefits in terms of efficiency and productivity for the business. Due to the temporary closure of its branches, the business experienced a rapid increase in sales and enquiries via its contact centre channel. On some occasions, call traffic increased by as much as 1000%. Nasstar Contact’s comprehensive reporting module delivers management information via a simple-to-use dashboard. This is extremely powerful when managing a remote team as it enables the business to focus on customer service levels set against KPI’s, no matter where the agents are operating from. Toolstation were able to use this management information to make informed decisions on how to best adapt to customer demand, with additional features such as Web Chat added to improve customer access.
The Solution
Within 72 hours of receiving the request, Nasstar had installed its hosted telephony solution, Talk, to replace the previously restrictive telephony solution, in addition to Nasstar Contact, a cloud contact centre.
Nasstar Contact is feature-rich and provides customisable widgets to enhance the customer experience, with functionality options such as updating the customer with the average queue time to help set their expectations from the initial point of contact.
The solution also provided Toolstation with access to IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technology which allows customers to interact via DTMF tones to ensure they are successfully directed to the right department or agent for their individual requirement for an improved customer experience.
Furthermore, both Talk and Nasstar Contact are fully integrated with AgentPay, ensuring that the customer’s sensitive data is always secure. This was particularly important during the pandemic as AgentPay prevents card details from being stored on Toolstation’s systems or exposed to their contact centre agent, ensuring that Toolstation agents and systems are PCI compliant from any location.
“During times of disruption, it is comforting to know that we have a partner like Nasstar to turn to for help and guidance. The team was able to respond rapidly to our needs, ensuring operations could continue to run smoothly. As a result, we now have a solution that not only allows us to work remotely, but also delivers additional benefits in terms of efficiency and productivity, whilst completely de-scoping our agent desktop environments from PCI DSS whether working within our contact centre or remotely from home. My thanks to the team for pulling off a great service in such a short space of time.”