A UK online fashion retailer: IVR self-service and caller verification on its own CRM

The retailer's customer care contact centre exists to support its online business: order management, online accounts, order fulfilment and processing, and delivery enquiries. It ran on a self-built and self-configured PBX that had become difficult to maintain, and the retailer had decided to move to Genesys Cloud CX, rebuilding the service rather than carrying the old one across.

It also wanted the new platform to do more than answer calls. The aim was to identify and verify callers automatically, from their phone number alone or together with their order details, and let them complete common requests in the IVR. The information needed to do that lived in the retailer's own home-grown CRM and ERP systems, not in any packaged application with a ready-made connector.

Working on behalf of the retailer's incumbent Genesys reseller partner, QVCCS designed, built, validated and tested the new solution and moved it into production. The retailer chose Genesys Cloud CX 1 for its team of fifteen, with a Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) SIP trunk for voice. The team may have been small, but the integration and the user stories behind it called for the full method: discovery, definition, design, build, test and validation, migration to live, and transition to run and evolve.

1. Discovery and definition of the user stories for each enquiry type
2. A custom integration and custom data actions to the retailer's own CRM and ERP
3. Identification by the caller's phone number or an order reference
4. Verification against a broad range of the caller's own details
5. IVR self-service menus for orders, payments and accounts
6. Agent scripts with a screen pop of verification status and order details
7. Testing, validation, migration to live and handover to run and evolve

QVCCS built a custom integration and custom data actions that let Genesys Cloud CX call the REST and JSON services of the retailer's own CRM and ERP. When a call arrives, the caller's phone number or the order reference they enter points to a likely customer record. The caller is then verified against details held in that record, such as an order, their address, phone number or postcode. Callers always know something about their own order, so verification is quick and convenient for them.

Around 25 fields come back from the retailer's systems and are available throughout the inbound flow and the IVR, so menus can respond to the caller's own orders and account. When a caller chooses to speak to someone, the same data travels with the call. Agent scripts show the agent the identification and verification status, why the caller left the IVR, recent orders, address details and more, so the agent can get to the heart of the matter straight away.

The project completed on time and on budget, giving the retailer a strong inbound voice solution and an IVR that lets verified callers serve themselves across a wide range of needs. Callers can deal with payments, including how to pay, making a payment, Direct Debits, changing a payment date, struggling or unable to pay on time, and disputing a fee or charge. They can manage their account, from recent transactions to changing account or bank details, or closing it.

New customers have self-service and assisted pathways for online account support, checking the status of an account application and resolving registration issues. Callers can report fraud, unrecognised transactions, and phishing or scams that pretend to come from the retailer. However large that set of options, the ability to speak to someone about anything is always there, and the agent who answers already knows who is calling and why.

• A self-built PBX replaced by Genesys Cloud CX with a BYOC SIP trunk
• Callers identified and verified against the retailer's own CRM and ERP
• Self-service for payments, accounts, new customers and fraud reports
• Agents see verification status, IVR exit reason and order details on arrival
• Delivered on time and on budget in six months

The value in this project sat in the retailer's own systems. Rather than waiting for a packaged connector that did not exist, QVCCS treated the home-grown CRM and ERP as first-class citizens of the design and built the integration to fit them. Once the data was there, the IVR could do real work for callers, and every call that did reach an agent arrived with its context attached.

It is also another example that the number of agents says little about the depth of a solution. Fifteen users still needed careful discovery, a custom integration, a broad set of self-service journeys, agent scripting and thorough testing, and treating the project by its requirements rather than its size is what delivered it on time.