Viewing customer care through a new lens: Scrivens changes the game with Avaya

Scrivens Opticians and Hearing Care is prized for its fantastic customer service at a local, personalized level. Founded over 80 years ago, the family-owned and operated optician and hearing care specialist now supports over 180 branches across England with plans for further expansion—all while maintaining the core values on which the company was built. People are at the heart of Scrivens’ business model. The ability to provide personal service based on individual requirements and preferences is at the heart of all innovation plans.

Critical to the company’s vision is stable, scalable and sustainable growth that enables Scrivens to deliver experiences that matter. This means maintaining high-quality phone service for customers calling to book appointments, obtain advice or discuss service issues, even when staff are busy caring for customers in-store. It means securely expanding while preserving the local feel and human touch that has garnered Scrivens respect and admiration through the decades. Ultimately, it means finding the right technology partner who understands their mission and shares in their customer values.

Avaya heard them loud and clear (see what we did there?). Puns aside, we offered the proficiency and product value for Scrivens to seamlessly, securely and cost-effectively grow while continuing to deliver on its promise of fantastic service and clinical excellence. Here’s how…

Eliminating the Dreaded Wait

Companies need to go beyond minimization to fully eliminate long wait times. This was a key concern for Scrivens in its quest to grow—delivering value to greater communities—while maintaining the quality of service its brand was best known for. A few years ago, the company noticed some roadblocks in its ability to answer calls in a timely manner. Those obstacles eventually turned into barricades that prevented the company from delivering care in the ways its customers needed and expected.

Scrivens’ IT Director David Hewitson shared his vision behind the development:

“If branches were tied up or calls weren’t answered within just a few rings, we wanted them to be automatically rerouted to our contact center. We needed to ensure calls would be answered quickly, intelligently and attentively, no matter how busy a branch was.”

Research shows that all it takes is waiting on hold for one minute for almost 60% of customers to hang up when calling a company. We wanted to take Scrivens above and beyond, so we made it our shared goal to connect every store branch to a central contact center so that all calls would be answered within 20 seconds flat.

Scrivens’ existing system couldn’t intelligently connect all branches to the contact center in this way. The company needed an adaptable and integrative system that was easy to use for the company’s 1000+ staff, while doing the legwork of connecting every branch to a central contact center for i