Orchard Brands
Improves Customer Experience
Industry
Retail
Company
Headquartered in Middleton, Massachusetts, Orchard Brands is a direct-to-consumer retailer of name brand and private label merchandise with a portfolio of 11 consumer lines serving the boomer and senior demographic, generally considered age 50 and over. Orchard Brands include Blair, Tog Shop, and Appleseed’s, among other enduring names. Orchard Brands sells apparel, accessories, shoes, and home, garden, and health products through its catalogs and e-commerce sites.
Challenge
Orchard Brands is an IBM® i shop, powering its IT systems and operations around three AS/400s located in data centers in the northeastern United States. The IBM i systems host picking/shipping, financial operations, and the Oracle CommercialWare order processing application, among other critical business processes. The target persona for the call center is a woman over 50 years of age who prefers to place orders by phone and speak to a human rather than purchase merchandise online. To fully meet the needs of this persona, the call center starts hiring temporary telephone employees in August to support seasonal surges in business over the holidays. During these peak call-in times, the number of call service representatives (CSRs) increases from 500 to 1000. Training for these seasonal hires is critical. Orchard Brands estimates it takes approximately three weeks to get a temporary CSR proficient in answering the phone and processing orders.
Results
- Reduced seasonal employee attrition
- Eliminated 50 seconds from the order processing time
- Cut training time by eight hours for new and seasonal employees
- Improved the accuracy of first-time orders
Products
Applications
- Retail Call Center
Want to learn more?
The new GUI has helped streamline the order management system, reducing training time while enhancing the CSRs’ access to new tools that have helped to significantly improve the customer experience.