International Greetings plc is the one of the world’s leading designers, manufacturers, importers and distributors of gift packaging and greetings cards, stationery and creative play products. The company has been established in the UK for over 30 years, and focuses on supplying major retailers with genuine one-stop solutions enabling them to provide own brand offerings such as cards, crackers and wrapping paper.
Two years ago International Greetings won a contract with Tesco to support its new Tesco Cards operation, providing an end-to-end offering to enable the retailer to compete with personalised digital greetings sites. As part of its proposition, International Greetings also agreed to deliver a dedicated customer service component for Tesco, and looked at different ways of fulfilling this important part of the contract.
“In looking for a hosted customer contact solution that would support Tesco’s multi-channel requirements, it quickly became clear that mplsystems had the right solution for International Greetings”
Mike Harris, Group IT Manager, International Greetings
According to International Greetings’ Group IT Manager, Mike Harris: “working with a leading UK retail organisation such as Tesco meant that we had to deliver a best practice customer service solution, however we didn’t initially have a clear insight into the precise level of interaction volumes expected. Given that we had a particularly tight timescale to get the Tesco Cards operation up and running, we knew it made sense to look for a hosted contact centre approach.”
After investigating a range of different offerings, International Greetings selected mplsystems to provide a hosted customer service platform to support its new Tesco Cards business. For organisations like International Greetings setting up a new operation the mplsystems’ hosted solution can be deployed rapidly. The approach also avoids the need for significant capital expenditure and de-risks the customer service process where growth is unpredictable.
“Adopting a cloud-based customer contact centre approach made sense for our Tesco Cards project, and it was clear that with mplsystems we could quickly take advantage of the latest customer contact technologies without upfront costs and with minimal disruption,” continued Mike Harris. “Working with mplsystems we were able to implement an agile, multi-channel contact platform in less than two months that allowed us to respond rapidly and effectively to queries from Tesco Cards customers.”
The mplsystems intelligentContact technology enabled International Greetings to provide Tesco Cards customers with a seamless multi-channel contact centre experience across voice and email, with agents able to start interactions on one channel and shift to another where applicable. mplsystems’ cloud delivery allowed International Greetings to access contact technology features on a pay per seat/per month basis, keeping IT and support costs to a minimum as mplsystems operated the technology.
“Tesco Cards were initially keen to provide out-of-hours support for its customers, so we were able to take advantage of intelligentContact’s cloud accessibility to extend our customer service operations beyond the contact centre to include homeworking agents,” added Mike Harris. “The mplsystems solution also gave us the flexibility we needed to get our contact solution up and running quickly, while still allowing us to fine-tune elements of our deployment as our client’s specific requirements evolved.”
In reviewing the solution, Mike Harris reports that the hosted mplsystems solution more than lived up to International Greetings’ expectations, delivering against all Tesco Cards’ demanding contact requirements. “Whether it was matching customer demand at high volume times such as after Mother’s Day, or integrating functionality to support our email responses, intelligentContact from mplsystems proved the right investment for Intelligent Greetings.”
Business benefits
• With its comprehensive multi-channel support capabilities, the mplsystems solution provided Tesco Cards with comprehensive cross-channel support
• Incredibly quick to install, with deployment taking just two months from initial specification through to final implementation
• Hosted cloud-based solution proved flexible and particularly easy to scale to support Tesco Cards’ changing volume requirements
