Solutions Center

By Stefan Happe – Customer Service Manager

For the past few years since the acquisition of the Arcam brand, the Customer Service team for the HARMAN Luxury Audio BU was not only divided by location and time zone, but also by the tools they had at their disposal. The phone systems between the U.S. and the EU based parts of the team were not compatible. A U.S. based customer was only able to contact Luxury Audio Customer Support during the U.S. office hours, an EU based customer could only do so during UK office hours, without facing long distance charges.

In 2020, we were facing a number of issues when working from home became the norm. Many customers now had the time during the day to look after their home audio system and were able to call Customer Support while they were right in front of their unit, which caused a higher demand in phone availability.

In 2019, Lifestyle Customer Service started looking at future investments in our phone systems and this spike in demand in 2020 helped us to move forward far quicker than anticipated. It was thanks to our lifestyle leadership that we could secure the funding and were able to start a “Test Setup” within the smallest of the Lifestyle Customer Support Departments, the Luxury Audio Department.

In January, the integration of the new system started, by setting up a sandbox testing ground for the new cloud-based Amazon Connect and Salesforce Voice setup. We decided to enlist the help of the integration specialists at Neuraflash to build this new channel into our existing Salesforce CRM setup, which was finally rolled out into the real world in May 2021. This direct integration of telephony into our CRM system meant that all service agents were working within the same system with the same tools along the same guidelines, no matter their location. This finally enabled us to provide phone coverage from UK AM to U.S. West Coast PM for all customers globally.

In addition, we now have new reporting capabilities, which gives us new, never before available insights into our performance as a Customer Support provider. In the past, all we could do was estimate the number of calls we receive during any given period of time.

With the new system we can now, for the first time, see how many calls come in, how long the average waiting time is, how many customers prefer to leave a voice message and how many calls have been abandoned (customer hung up after waiting to get through). This is all incredibly useful information that shows us where we need to concentrate our future efforts.

We now also have the ability to see what is involved in handling a call, how long the average call lasts and how many calls are handled for a single case in order to be resolved.

Lastly, as a cherry on top, we now have all calls recorded and transcribed, enabling us to better hand over a case to another agent that might have more experience with a certain product.

The introduction of this new phone system was the first step into becoming a fully global Customer Support Team. As we look towards the future, we will be adding new channels like Whatsapp and Chat and continue to enhance and improve the system so that we can provide the best possible support to our global customers.

Contact Luxury Audio Support:
[email protected]
U.S. Toll Free: +1-888-691-4171
International: +44-1707-668-012