Efficiency Behind The Cup: Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
Watch how Cisco UCCX helped Green Mountain Coffee Roasters scale to the next level
Today, we’re unlocking a time capsule from 2014 to revisit one of our best case studies. In this story of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, we’ll detail exactly how we helped them transform their business through their in-house call center.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Humble Roots
In 1981, Robert Stiller was on holiday at a ski resort in Waitsfield, Vermont. One day, he popped into a small coffee shop and had a cup of joe that stopped him in his tracks.
“He loved the coffee. He bought the coffee, the café, the roaster, and it just grew from there. And now we’re a $160 million company and we have over 90 varieties of coffee that we sell,” said Nancy Metivier, manager of the call center department, at the time of this video in 2014.
Even in its earliest days, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was committed to great coffee, social and environmental responsibility, and exceptional customer service.
In 2014, they needed help perfecting the customer journey and they came to us for help.
An Outdated Call Center
The call center at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters had an extremely critical role in the company.
Not only did it need to enable accelerated growth across both core and new markets, but it also had to ensure that customers’ needs were being met, and those customers left these calls satisfied with the outcome.
Our team quickly discovered that their applications on their existing telephone system were not meeting their needs. Their call center application was outdated, and it couldn’t properly route people and handle their transactions fast enough. In response, we tailored an approach to increase agents efficiency and roll out the red carpet approach on the customer journey.
The Transformative Solution
When you first get into a call center, you need to observe. Understanding what is happening today is often the first thing companies gloss over.
What’s the average call time? How many seats are in the call center? What are your recurring peak busy hours? Using those facts, how can you make employees more efficient? For example, how can you boost (or even double) your throughput with the same amount of people?
With Cisco IPCC Express, we helped deliver the solution for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
Cisco IPCC Express is an enterprise level solution contact center, designed specifically for the small to medium business. We knew this functionality would be a powerful tool to increase their agent efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters specifically found powerful benefits in three features:
Skills based routing: This technology allows callers to get to the right resource the first time, eliminating the frustration of being “bounce around.”
“We started using this during our holiday season, which is our busiest time of the year, and I had to bring in four new reps. With skills based routing, we were able to only have them learn the basic order entry features. It normally would take us four to six weeks before we would put a CSR on the phone. With skills based routing, we could get somebody up and running within a week and a half. That was a big win for us,” said Nancy.
CTI screen pop: This computer telephony integration pulls up complete customer details. From a caller's phone number to their last five orders and it’s presenting the information, to resources, before the phone even rings. “Our customers love the computer telephony integration that we're using. We have a success rate of usually over 50% of our phone calls that come in and we know who they are, before we have to ask the customer for their phone number or for their zip code…That makes a big difference, and they love it. They love that we know who they are,” Nancy explained.
Historical reporting: “Call centers live and die by their reports. You can't manage what you can't measure,” said David Chiarello, current President at Workflow Concepts. He added that Cisco's historical reporting gives clients the ability to monitor what's happening in their call center – like the amount of time calls are waiting in the queues, or the time it takes for an agent to facilitate a transaction.
“It enabled us to see exactly what's going on in the call center. Or we can do things like email reports to marketing after a marketing campaign has run,” said Nancy.
“It used to take them 16 hours to generate the necessary reports to manage their call center. That process now takes less than a couple hours on a weekly basis,” added David.
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Today
Our work with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters prepared them for what came next.
Today, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has expanded beyond Vermont through mergers and acquisitions - first with Keurig, and then with Dr Pepper Snapple Group.
The company site still credits its birthplace mountains as a special place: “It’s where we developed our adventurous spirit and commitment to improving the lands through sustainably sourced coffee. We're driven to bring the world a richer, better cup of coffee.”
Are You Ready To Strengthen Your Business?
You’re the best in your industry, and we’re the best in ours. Constructing a successful contact center requires critical planning and highly experienced experts that follow an exact process from engineering to implementation, from training to go live support, to reporting, analytics and forecasting.
At Workflow Concepts, we’re a uniquely skilled team of contact center professionals with experience in designing, staffing, managing and operating call centers for over 20 years.
Customized to your needs, we will transform your Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Solution to help you improve your customer’s journey, maximize the utilization of your Cisco environment, increase the occupancy of your agents, and accelerate the return on your investment. Call us at (207) 558-8600 to learn more.