Damart Delights Generational Segments with Avaya Omnichannel Contact Center

Catalog retailer Damart UK needed a contact center solution flexible enough to deliver the high-touch experiences that customers want today—as well as the higher-tech experiences that customers will want tomorrow.

When executives at Damart UK think about the kind of experiences they want to create for their customers, there are certain numbers they can’t ignore. Forty five percent of the catalogue retailer’s orders arrive by phone. Another 35 percent arrive through the mail—and that’s snail mail, not email.

All this is not terribly surprising: Damart is the catalogue retailer of choice for seniors in the UK seeking fashionable, stylish, and comfortable clothing (as well as the dependable warm winter range for which Damart is so famous). A typical Damart customer—call her “Betty”—is 72 years old. “Dorothy” is even older, though “Margaret,” at 65, is slightly younger. Damart knows that the women in each of these profiles prefer to pick up the phone or send in a form to order their garments. Find a way to improve that experience, and she’ll be delighted.

But then there are the “Lindas,” women younger than the Margarets who are accustomed to—and may even prefer—ordering clothing over the web or through a mobile app. Damart’s digital channels currently deliver just over 20 percent of the company’s orders (which top £100 million annually), but Damart executives have seen the future in those numbers. Each year, the percentage of handwritten paper orders ticks down a point or two, even as the percentage of digital orders ticks up by the same number of points.

All these numbers recently collided when Damart executives decided to replace the company’s aging contact center. How best to delight Betty, Dorothy, and Margaret, while also winning over Linda? How best to engage Linda without asking Betty, Dorothy, and Margaret to interact in ways they don’t care for?

Damart looked at several contact center solutions, but in the end only one fit comfortably and ticked all the boxes for Linda, Margaret, Betty, and Dorothy. “Some of the solutions we looked at lacked functionality we wanted,” says Jeanette Askin, Head of Customer Service for Damart UK. “Others had the functionality and flexibility we wanted but were very costly. It came down to questions of functionality our customers and colleagues could use, and the ease of implementation at an affordable cost. The Avaya solution was within our budget, and it offered all the functionality and flexibility we know that our teams wanted, such as voice recording, speech analytics, agent KPI dashboards, outbound campaigns and customer surveys.”

Here’s how we helped Damart find the solution that fit….