Motoring and cycling products retailer Halfords is doubling down on digital customer communications

As part of the company’s digital transformation efforts to improve efficiency and profitability, Halfords has been focused on unifying communications and contact centre operations across their three main business divisions - retail, automotive and mobile services.

However, their legacy on-premises communications infrastructure was a barrier to achieving this goal, with multiple systems and dated technology.

Following a rigorous procurement process, Halfords had selected 8x8 due to platform scalability, flexibility and integrations with Salesforce and Calabrio Teleopti Workforce Management.

Initially, Halfords deployed the integrated 8x8 contact centre and communications product across more than 700 locations to support 4,700 employees and contact centre agents. Staff productivity and customer engagement have dramatically improved with simplified internal call routing between business divisions, which was often a manual process in the past.

Tight CRM integration with 8x8 Contact Centre allows agents to have more informed conversations with customers, and security has been further strengthened as agents can process secure credit card payments using PCI-compliant 8x8 Secure Pay.

Customer engagement

As the business environment changed over the past year, Halfords worked closely with 8x8 to rapidly expand global customer engagement efforts, more than doubling the number of contact centre agents using 8x8 to over 750.

As part of the expansion, Halfords added a contact centre team in South Africa with more than 200 remote contact centre agents to support the largely digital retail operation. This allowed Halfords to minimise business disruption, while keeping agents safe and productive.

Gareth Brophy, head of customer support at Halfords, said: “It’s so important that we give our customers the experience they expect, whether face-to-face in a retail store, Autocentre or over the phone. Partnering with 8x8 and deploying an integrated cloud contact centre and communications product, enables us to deliver a customer-first strategy, and scale our operations to drive efficiency and profitability.”