Putting Customer Experience First

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 wi