Acer balances customer experience and cost

Acer is one of the world’s top technology companies serving customers in over 160 countries. Acer’s 7,000 employees design, sell, and support computing products including notebooks, desktops, monitors and products for gamers and creators.

The Challenge: Improve CX without increasing costs

“We’ve spent the past six years improving the customer experience,” says Mark Groveunder, Senior Vice President of IT and Services for Acer. “The piece that was still frustrating us was not understanding the customer experience at the contact center level.”

Acer serves customers in North and South America with a blend of operations. Certain contacts are handled by in-house contact centers and home agents. Most contacts are handled by outsourced contact center providers. Those calls were routed to outsourcing partners’ private networks, and beyond that point Acer had limited visibility into what happened next.

“All of the contact center data – service level, average speed of answer, hold time, handle time – was on the partners’ Avaya switches,” Mr. Groveunder recalls.

He also saw that a big piece of Acer’s contact center costs went to cover conventional telephone infrastructure. “Paying partners for their switches and T1s made it harder for us to control costs,” he says. Acer began searching for a way to gain transparency into the customer experience, while reducing costs.

The Solution: One system of intelligence in the cloud

Acer chose 8x8 and its single system of intelligence to finally provide the clarity they were missing. “8x8 gives us transparency, which helps us deliver a great customer experience,” Mr. Groveunder says.

The Benefits: CX visibility, agility and controllable costs

“8x8 Analytics provides out-of-the-box and easily customizable reporting that has given us the visibility we were lacking,” Mr. Groveunder says. “Supervisors are still discovering all the different reports that are available.” Better visibility gives Acer control over the customer experience. “And experience drives satisfaction,” he says.

Agent productivity and service quality

Acer is using 8x8 Quality Management to observe and evaluate customer interactions with ease. 8x8 gives Acer the advantage of having all call recordings on a single platform, instead of each contact center using siloed Avaya tools.

“8x8 Quality Management helps us identify if we’re on target serving our customers,” Mr. Groveunder says. “And having it all in one place will make for better calibration between sites, so we can be consistent about scoring calls companywide.”

With 8x8 Quality Management, Acer extracts meaningful insight from every interaction to drive performance improvements throughout its contact centers, including home agents.

8x8 X Series

“Last year was busy,” Mr. Groveunder recalls. “We implemented 8x8 Contact Center and along the way we moved our business users off of old PBX technology and onto 8x8 X Series. Now we have the employees at all seven offices on 8x8 for enterprise communications, and that’s not counting the contact centers.”

The move to 8x8 came at the right time for Acer’s San Jose office move. “It worked out great because we didn’t have to move that old PBX,” Mr. Groveunder recalls. “During the move, employees used their laptops and the 8x8 Desktop App for calls and chats. 8x8 made our office move a lot easier.”

Acer employees adopted the 8x8 Desktop App right away. “People love the 8x8 App and it works well, so that’s the biggest unexpected benefit from choosing 8x8,” Mr. Groveunder says.