Innovative technology revolutionise customer communications both centrally and via an extensive branch network

Keeping up with the increasingly digital automotive industry

Europe’s largest independently-owned automobile company, Arnold Clark runs 24 new car franchises from over 200 retail outlets across the UK. The group has diversified from car sales to a multidisciplinary organisation and sells more than 300,000 cars a year.

A variety of expired telephony solutions from multiple vendors caused reliability and management problems for Arnold Clark. Without a rational vendor model, the company wasn’t able to leverage its size and influence. In order to maintain leadership amongst their competitors, Arnold Clark needed a scalable and dependable omnichannel platform. They selected Cisco for its contact centre technology along with BrightCloud Group as a delivery partner. BrightCloud Group also introduced its unique CCBox contact centre management solution into the customer experience (CX) equation.

A solid base for business and technology growth

When the partnership first began, BrightCloud Group focussed on transformation and migration of core unified communications and contact centre infrastructure. An immediate priority was implementing contact centre technology with interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities, while adopting quality management (QM) and customer experience (CX) monitoring.

Rollout of call recording and QM across the branches enabled measured and harmonised employee experience (EX) for the entire workforce. Providing QM to all 6,000 branch agents uses innovative practices that remove the necessity to fully licence every user while enabling a number of sessions recorded, QM sessions managed and devices monitored. This delivered a saving in licensing alone over the contract term.

In addition to the core customer services, Arnold Clark uses the Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (PCCE) as a telephony and routing solution to their branch network. During deployment, 176 branches were rolled out onto the solution, all calls were pre-routed via the contact centre and self-managed via the CCBox Contact Centre Management Portal. In total, the branch network consists of 176 branches, in the region of 6000 agents and 8000 direct numbers.

“BrightCloud are up there among our most strategic suppliers and, while centralisation creates huge benefits and efficiencies, it also puts massive responsibility on one platform and one supplier. If BrightCloud keep doing what they’ve done to date, we’ll have a long and fruitful relationship.”

– John Brown, CIO, Arnold Clark

CCBox Marketing Routing System removes complexity

BrightCloud Group introduced CCBox Marketing Routing System (MRS) tool to ease management and control of all campaigns. Through MRS lines can be managed effectively from source number to branch and agent. This allows marketing teams to assign dialled numbers to campaigns and direct inbound calls to branches, while logging source and destination from the self-service portal. Able to track dialled numbers and calls, QM reviews call effectiveness from a per-branch perspective.

CCBox AI technology routeschat-based channels

Bot technology featuring artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), was implemented while expanding the UC infrastructure to the branch network. To support interactions through SMS and social media chat-based channels, BrightCloud Group used the CCBox chat bot as a proxy.

The bot seamlessly hands over complex interactions to agents, who use the single chat interface for interactions alongside ACD-type functionality such as chat requeue and transfer, CRM integrations, skills-based routing and post-chat surveys. Having a single interface to the contact centre has reduced agent requirements for workflow-based interactions.

“What made this engagement successful was the partnership BrightCloud forged with the customer. Through close collaboration we achieved trusted advisor status. For a company as large as Arnold Clark, it’s important to have a partner who stays involved and leads conversations about future innovations.”

– Meena Anton, Contact Centre Consultant, BrightCloud Group

A fully realised strategic and agile partnership

Starting as a basic telephony and contact centre integrator, BrightCloud Group has become an extension of the team, providing additional resources and guidance throughout the process. BrightCloud Group’s long-term vision allows Arnold Clark to define the path to get where they want to be, helping to fill in the details and flawlessly execute against the roadmap.

Already, Arnold Clark has a digital infrastructure that leads the charge in terms of world-beating CX, paving the way to future enhancements. Both teams are continuously looking at new ways to evolve the customer journey as the automotive industry becomes increasingly digital. Adapting to market changes is effortless through regular technology improvements across branches, whether it is adding to the existing infrastructure or enhancing something that they already have.