Known for its distinctive big red “O,” Overstock.com, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, is not just another online retailer. Overstock differentiates itself with great prices and, says Carter Lee, vice president of information systems and technology, great passion for customer service.

 

The company offers brand-name merchandise at discount prices to its customers. Every item is in-stock — nothing is back-ordered — with most orders shipping within two business day at $2.95 per order.

 

Customer service is the other important component of Overstock.com’s appeal, a sustainable competitive advantage, which its customers value highly. Friendly, knowledgeable agents are available 24/7. The Internet retailer keeps a close watch on the customer experience, monitoring customer satisfaction levels and continually looking for ways to improve.

 

Helping to answer that passion for customer service, literally, is Overstock’s partnership with Echopass. Echopass provides the online retailer with an on-demand contact center platform that supports its regular and additional seasonal peak agents.

 

Customer support is like the canary in the coal mine, Lee points out. You need an early warning system, because problems in customer service usually indicate problems elsewhere in the business.

 

In 2007 Overstock’s team redoubled its efforts to meet and exceed customers’ expectations. After extensive soul searching and self examination, it became clear, recounts Lee that the combination of the contact center technology the firm had deployed and the extensive use of an outsourcer was hindering, rather than facilitating, customer service quality.

 

Since its inception, Overstock has utilized a range of infrastructure and configurations, from completely outsourced to completely in-sourced, to half and half. Early on, it used a premise-based phone and Genesys (News - Alert) routing solution. That experience with Genesys’ routing software was positive, however maintaining it in a production environment was costly, and finding qualified engineers was difficult. Overstock deployed other premise-based contact center solutions after using Genesys, but these too had associated issues.

 

“Maintaining the complex infrastructure was consuming extensive IT department resources, causing our staff to continually operate in a reactive, rather than a customer centric, proactive mode,” said Lee. “We didn’t have the expertise to continue supporting the technology ourselves, and it would have been difficult and costly to build up the needed staff.”

 

Overstock wanted to find a partner to hand off the technology management tasks, one with the required depth of expertise. But it also wanted to maintain direct control of agents to ensure the best possible customer care. Outsourcing more of the operation was not a viable option.

 

Lee’s team then researched the market and evaluated numerous alternatives. It then came across Echopass, which offered a virtual contact center built on a solid foundation using best-of-breed technology – including Genesys – but in a hosted model. They also provided high-quality 24/7 customer support and a guaranteed level of high system reliability that would introduce new business agility to the firm. Due diligence via enterprise customers revealed that the Echopass solution validated the company’s on demand, always on, proven reputation.

 

“Echopass would allow Overstock.com to focus on providing a better customer experience, while leaving the technology to a trusted partner,” explains Lee. ”It was obvious to us that Echopass On Demand was the right choice”

 

Like most retailers, Overstock’s sales peak during the last quarter of the year. Cutover was scheduled for early September 200 – right before the Overstock busy season. The firm annually supplements its 175 regular contact center agents with another 150 provided through an outsourcer. One of the facets it liked about Echopass that it discovered during due diligence is that they have many outsourcers using their services which provided us a multi-source alternative: all centers and all agents using the same technology.

 

Yet just prior to the Echopass cutover, concern over the legacy outsourcer supplier and their ability to provide high quality customer care caused Overstock to reconsider its approach for the busy season. It would now need to hire another outsourcer, or become our own multi-sourcer by hiring an extra 150 agents and putting them on the new platform. Quite a few people within the company doubted that Lee’s department could pull off adding all those new agents right at the time of the cutover.

 

The deployment proceeded without incident, though. It went remarkably well and took only 90 days from the day we signed the contract.

 

“It was one of the smoothest cutovers I had been involved with,” said Lee. “One morning we turned it on and began taking calls immediately. The reason why we were able to pull off this massive cutover was the expertise from Echopass, coupled with the commitment from the Overstock team.”

 

The move to Echopass has yielded significant and in some cases unexpected benefits. The shift from technology focus, managing the infrastructure internally to a business focus has allowed Overstock.com to measurably improve the customer experience.

 

Lee reports that the firm has a better agent pool now because it can focus on people and training instead of technology, plus it can see and measure the tangible results. Prior to Echopass, Overstock struggled to meet its service level goal to answer 80 percent of calls within 90 to 120 seconds. Today, 93 percent of callers reach an agent in less than 60 seconds. That is a significant metric improvement.

 

Overstock.com’s old NPS score for customers that had to contact customer service, averaged around 15 percent. Since implementing Echopass, it has seen a steady monthly increase and our NPS score for those specific customers is now up to 36 percent. This compares to what many companies seek to achieve in overall NPS score which is around 40 percent. The overall NPS score for Overstock is now over 70 percent, way above industry average.

 

Overstock.com learned some things it hadn’t anticipated that in doing so has enabled it to deliver better quality service and become more productive. Reports provided by Echopass showed a higher level of abandoned calls than it had before with the combination of its old system and outsourcer. When Overstock looked closely, it discovered that the prior reports it produced were inaccurate, significantly under-reporting the abandon calls it were experiencing. Customer service had been negatively affected, unbeknown to Overstock.com.

 

“Now that we had real data, we could see and address the issue with staffing and self service,” reported Lee. “Since going live with Echopass, abandonment rates have dropped sharply, from over 8 percent to under 2 percent today. We’ve become more efficient than we were before, and we have accurate reporting of our agent and customer service operations, which is crucial to our ongoing management of the business.”

 

Overstock.com is continuing to find ways to improve customer service and loyalty by leveraging the Echopass solution. Not only are its agents receiving more training, they’re more effective with monitoring and call recording capabilities, reports Lee. Previously, it was using digital recorders. It could teach agents what to do, but it couldn’t show them how they were performing. Call recording gives us that tool. In addition, Overstock will soon turn on Echopass screen capture services and plans to tighten the integration with Overstock’s CRM application.

 

“Since going live with the hosted contact center solution from Echopass, we’ve found it easier to focus on the business, improve agent training and productivity, and increase customer satisfaction by reducing wait times, while lowering costs in the contact center,” said Lee. “The bottom line is, sales are increasing, yet Overstock.com has had to add fewer agents because our agents are more efficient. Echopass has helped our agents be more efficient, our supervisors to have better management tools, and most importantly, made our customers much happier.”

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