Since becoming one of the UK’s first ‘e-tailers’ in the 1990s, Hotel Chocolat has grown its business and reputation all over the world. Konecta takes every opportunity to support its growth, for example, by initially starting with outbound-only activity for its subscriptions service, and then expanding to inbound telephony. The deeper partnership turned our agents into brand experts, in a way that also boosted outbound success.
In 2024, Hotel Chocolat was looking to enhance its customer services and efficiency still further, through:
- a single-partner customer service operation covering multi-contact channels
- visibility of analytics and insights to drive continuous improvement
- flexibility to efficiently handle demand peaks around Christmas, Easter and other holiday and celebration times, while delivering good customer experiences.
Konecta was on hand with the ideas and expertise to do all this.
We offered Hotel Chocolat a single operation covering all major channels, including a centralized email solution. Through bringing all these channels together, we can streamline and personalize Hotel Chocolat’s customer journeys to a high degree.
The solution is set up on multiple queues to improve supervision flexibility, providing the agility to prioritize key customers, channels, queries or issues. Increased agent visibility of all historic communications further augments the personalization options.
We also offered Hotel Chocolat a range of innovative technology solutions to enhance customer experience, such as the use of AI, chatbots, and also TechSee, a visual tool solution that allows our trained agents to see, guide and solve customers’ issues in real time.
And while delivering all of this, our solution provides effective and accelerated ramp-ups, whenever needed, through access to multiple Konecta sites and trained staff.
Our first full quarter of delivering single-operation, multi-channel services to Hotel Chocolat included the busy Christmas period when customer queries soar. Through cross-training on all channels, Konecta’s dedicated team quickly reached good levels of service, and handled +26,000 calls and +53,000 emails.
We also completed a TechSee pilot trial. 95% of customers offered the service were happy to make use of it, on queries ranging from technical support for their Velvetiser, Hotel Chocolate hot chocolate machine, to questions about damaged orders. The trial saw a good increase in first contact resolution, and we will now roll it out more widely to support Hotel Chocolat and its customers.
Other next-steps include the use of AI-driven chatbots integrated with the Hotel Chocolat knowledge base. This will allow our agents to answer customer queries more speedily and effectively than ever, while also offering enhanced value for Hotel Chocolat. It’s a tasty mix!
