Overview
A $10 billion US retailer with thousands of storefronts and a spot on the Forbes Top 100 Most Customer-Centric Companies list built their reputation on remarkable in-store service. As the business grew, that experience increasingly relied on an aging network and telephony infrastructure that wasn’t built for how customers shop today. The retailer partnered with OneReach.ai to modernize their customer experience. The goal: to leapfrog competitors with a centralized, AI-powered contact center that could match the company’s brand promise of best-in-class service to its customers.
Problems
- Fragmented customer experience: This retailer ranked among the most customer-centric companies in the country, and couldn’t afford a fragmented customer experience. Each of the company’s thousands of storefronts had its own phone line, its own queue, and its own staff trying to juggle in-store customers and ringing phones at the same time. When a customer needed an appointment, a quote, or a quick question answered, the experience depended entirely on which store happened to pick up and how busy they were that hour.
- Legacy technical debt: Behind the scenes, the picture was just as tangled. A patchwork of aging telephony systems, no centralized contact center, and an SMS channel that was barely used despite being the channel customers actually preferred. Marketing couldn’t run outbound campaigns with proper feedback loops, and operations had no visibility into call drop-offs at the store level.
Leadership had a clear mandate: reduce technical debt, increase profitability, and protect the brand’s high NPS without compromising the in-store experience.
Solutions
The retailer’s transformation team rebuilt the customer experience around three foundational pieces:
- Calls answered intelligently, not by overworked store staff. AI agents now handle inbound calls at retail locations, answering routine questions, routing complex ones, and freeing store associates to focus on the customers actually in the building.
- A centralized contact center built for the way customers actually shop. A new contact center, with human-in-the-loop AI and live agent tools, replaced the fragmented per-store model, giving the brand consistent service quality and full visibility into every interaction.
- Deployment of two-way, customer-centric SMS solutions. Two-way SMS now powers appointment reminders, post-purchase follow-ups, and intelligent outbound marketing campaigns, turning a previously underused channel into a measurable revenue driver.
Outcomes
With one unified contact center instead of a sprawl of per-store phone trees and disconnected tools, every future investment in customer experience plugs into the same platform: new channels, new campaigns, new AI capabilities, without rebuilding the plumbing each time.
- Higher Sales: 9.7% increase in new sales calls.
- Greater Profitability: $80 million increase in annual gross profit.
- Reduced Support Load: 47% reduction in calls to stores
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: NPS score of 65
