In his research Barbaro discovered that while there were a variety of contact center vendors, only one—8x8—offered both a cloud-based contact center solution and an enterprise-grade business phone system. He recalled, “We found some respectable solutions for contact centers, but would have had to go to a second vendor for business phone service. Given the overlap and interdependencies between the two platforms, there was great appeal to source both from a single provider; making 8x8 very compelling.”
Utilizing Internet-based solutions for such critical business functions raised some initial concerns: “We had apprehension about the effect of poor Internet service at some of our locations and we were particularly worried about the impact this would have on voice quality,” recounted Barbaro. “But by surveying each location to verify that it would receive high-quality voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications, 8x8 convinced me that this wouldn’t be an issue.”
Given the urgency of getting usable caller traffic information, the implementation was phased to allow the new 8x8 Virtual Contact Center to come online first, followed by the company-wide deployment of the 8x8 Virtual Office cloud-based business phone system.
The infamous New England winters create a seasonal spike for Town Fair correlating to the purchase and installation of snow tires, and a second peak associated with the swapping back to regular tires at the return of better weather.
“We needed to ensure that the 8x8 Virtual Contact Center system was in place prior to the spring surge and targeted late August for the completion of 8x8 Virtual Office, just before we start ramping up again," Barbaro said. "The deployments were very well managed and despite the tight timeframes, we hit our installation goals.”
8x8 Virtual Office provides Town Fair Tire with a full-featured, complete cloud-based telephone system. It delivers seamless communication for all company locations and supports both mobile and desk phones. Features include collaboration capabilities such as web conferencing and video meetings. In addition, corporate features such as extension dialing, auto attendant, ring groups, call recording and Internet faxing are all part of the package. 8x8 Virtual Office includes a suite of web-based tools that provide detailed analytics to support informed decision-making.
Town Fair Tire also makes extensive use of 8x8 Virtual Contact Center ’s features; leveraging queues to facilitate efficient service and call-backs to save customers from being placed on hold. Customized messages provide key details such as hours of operation and new product information; and the company updates these seasonally to stay fresh. The system supports a variety of customer interaction methods, including phone, email, chat and the web.
“Having been in business for 50 years, our customers are long-standing and very loyal,” Barbaro stated. “If they suffer a flat tire they want to know that they can get into a shop promptly for service. With 8x8 Virtual Contact Center, when they call a local store they are routed to the contact center where an agent immediately schedules an appointment, which instantly shows up on the store’s reservation list. From our customer’s perspective, it’s all about getting their flat fixed tomorrow morning and 8x8 Virtual Contact Center enables us to do just that.”
Within Town Fair Tire’s contact center, a dedicated team of customer service agents handle appointment calls, and a similar number of tire experts answer inquiries when advice and tire pricing are needed. Relying on 8x8 Virtual Contact Center, the center efficiently handles over 1.3 million calls a year from all 95 stores.
8x8 Virtual Contact Center is integrated with Town Fair Tire’s CRM database and Barbaro’s team leverages the 8x8 APIs to enable data mining. He shared, “We have built business intelligence dashboards, spanning multiple applications, that we utilize constantly. With 8x8 Virtual Contact Center we now can see how many calls come in by agent, how many are for repairing flats versus new tires, or for tire rotations, et cetera. This lets us know exactly what’s happening in the field so we can stay close to the needs of our clients, tailor programs to drive sales, and maintain our market leadership in the Northeast.”
Each Town Fair Tire store typically has four retail lines, three lines dedicated to wholesale clients and additional circuits for credit card transactions and security/alarm connections. Barbaro summarized “We’re still phasing out some of our legacy contracts but we calculate that the total monthly savings on our phone bill are over 35 percent. On its own this is very impressive, but when I add in the efficiency gains and customer experience improvements we’ve been able to achieve, it really confirms we made a great choice in 8x8!”
