Encoded, a leading Payment Service Provider and pioneer of innovative secure payment solutions for contact centres, has announced that Milk & More has successfully deployed its IVR and Agent Assisted Payment technology to boost time and cost efficiencies.
Using Encoded, Milk & More has reduced the number of payments managed by contact centre advisors from 15,500 to just 2,900 a month. Most recently, the company has relied on Encoded to support a significant increase in demand during the COVID-19 health crisis as product sales soared by over 300%.
Milk & More’s contact centre is a busy operation with 130 advisors typically handling around 80,000 calls a month. At the start of lockdown when Coronavirus triggered panic buying, resulting in bare supermarket shelves and a switch to home delivery shopping, the Encoded solutions proved invaluable.
Rebecca Manning, Head of Customer Service at Milk and More said, “At the beginning of the pandemic we were inundated with calls and in just 3 days, registered around 30,000 new customers. This tremendous increase in demand forced us to prioritise calls including encouraging customers to use automated methods. Fortunately, the simplicity of Encoded’s IVR and Agent Assisted Payment solutions meant we could quickly train our advisors and educate our customers to the benefits of automated payments while maintaining customer loyalty. In a very short space of time, we have dramatically increased sales and the numbers are still growing.”
The greatest hurdle to introducing automated payments successfully was overcoming an initial reluctance from some customers, many of whom have been loyal to Milk & More for 40 or 50 years. Milk & More’s advisors were able to address any customer concerns and assist them in setting up automated IVR payments. This made it easy for them to make future payments themselves with the added freedom to pay for orders at any time of the day. The Encoded solution has also allowed Milk & More to offer customers a far wider range of efficient, secure payment options than before including direct debits and regular recurring payments.
Rob Crutchington, Managing Director of Encoded said, “The simplicity and flexibility of our technology allows organisations to add agility to their customer service operations. During periods of change or in a crisis when time is of the essence, busy contact centres can rely on our solutions to simplify the payment process. Implementing IVR payments helps to deflect time-consuming calls away from the contact centre and shave pounds off squeezed budgets all while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
