Putting Customer Experience First

Founded in 1892, Halfords is the UK’s leading motoring and cycling business, providing services and products through its 444 stores, 367 garages, and 120 mobile motoring services vans. Recent acquisitions have allowed Halfords Group plc to expand the total number of its garages, trading under the name of Halfords Autocentres providing MOT tests, servicing, and repairs, as well as its mobile van motoring service. Halfords has seen steady growth amidst tougher trading conditions during the pandemic, with like for like increase in its cycling, e-moblity, and garage businesses as well as strong performances in its motoring business, despite the lockdown conditions.

The challenge: Improving customer experience

With the huge increase in customer contacts during the pandemic, Halfords has been working to ensure that it can provide customers with the best possible customer experience. The on-premises telephony system wasn’t adaptable or scalable, and suffered issues. “Customers would call a store but couldn’t be transferred to another store location, Autocentre, or team. Instead, staff would have to provide a different phone number or pass along customer details to the appropriate colleague, asking them to phone customers back.

In the meantime, queues would form at the counter. It was labor-intensive and frustrating for everyone,” explains Gareth Brophy, Head of Customer Support at Halfords. Other legacy systems also made it difficult for Halfords to utilize metrics to track and improve the customer experience. However, teams from across Halfords joined forces to find a communications solution that met the needs of office staff as well as contact centre colleagues.

“It was a real group effort, involving our customer support, retail, Autocentre, IT, digital, and facilities teams,” says Brophy. “We wanted to make it simple for customers to interact with us — and to see us as one brand. The solution had to be cloud-based, robust, and future proof.” It was crucial for Halfords to have one phone number published on its new website for customer enquiries, with callers able to self-select the appropriate department.

The solution: Communications put customers in the driving seat

Halfords chose a comprehensive cloud communication platform provided by 8x8. This ties employee communication and the contact centre colleagues together — to enable users to deliver and monitor the customer experience throughout the organization. Teams in Halfords’ contact centre can now engage with customers using the tools that their customers want including voice, web chat, email, SMS, call-back, and social media, plus analytics. Support teams and other office workers will also benefit from improved abilities to get customers the right resources quickly. Administrators will be able to onboard new employees or change permissions with a few clicks on a web-based dashboard.