Vaillant Group’s UK Contact Center Upgrades its Customer Service with Vonage Contact Center

Vaillant has been providing efficient, innovative and environmentally friendly heating and hot water systems for over 140 years. The company prides itself on ‘thinking ahead’ and aims to provide the best practical solution for each customer according to their specific needs – from traditional oil and gas boilers to the latest advances in renewable technologies. 

When Vaillant needed to upgrade their customer service infrastructure, they looked for a solution that reflected their core ideals – something that utilized innovative technology, to provide extremely efficient call handling and deliver great customer care. 

Listed in Superbrands Top 100, the Vaillant Group sells over 400,000 boilers a year in the UK. Premium customer service is core to the Vaillant offering and, with over 600,000 inbound calls each year dealing with technical and customer service queries, the call handling system needed to be second to none.

Fortunately, they found Vonage Contact Center.

Transforming Vaillant’s customer service 

Before using Vonage Contact Center (VCC), the Vaillant service team was experiencing a number of problems with the premise-based equipment used in its 122-seat contact center: 

• Limited inbound trunk capacity 

• Poor integration with Salesforce 

• Limited call recording storage 

• Manual outbound calling

Once Vaillant decided upon Vonage, VCC was up-and-running in only five weeks. According to Vaillant’s commercial manager Andrew Naylor, “The implementation went really smoothly, and our expenses were low.  Our advisors easily adopted the new system.”

Advantages of Vonage Contact Center

One of the biggest benefits for Vaillant was the seamless integration of Vaillant’s CRM, Salesforce, and Vonage Contact Center.  Inbound and outbound calls are directly linked to the CRM database, greatly improving customer experience, as agents have all the relevant details (addresses, product details and previous history) to hand. With unlimited call recording capacity each call is linked to the customer record for compliance, training and dispute resolution.

Additionally, Vaillant appreciates the flexibility they now have with VCC.  They claim that Vonage Contact Center is incredibly easy to operate.  Vaillant staff didn’t need to be IT wizards, rely on expensive consultants or constantly pay vendors to make system changes. The service team found it quite easy to make any needed changes, themselves, to the IVR, to improve efficiency and customer experience. Now, when call volumes rise, an overflow contact center receives just the right proportion of calls from Vaillant. Previously, there was no ability to calibrate the flow of calls.

The ease with which new phone numbers can be set-up, and call flows constructed, has enabled Vaillant marketing campaigns to be more effectively tracked and the source of inbound calls to be identified. This feedback has enabled the company to build better campaigns and it has had a measurable positive impact on sales. 

As part of its customer service strategy to ‘think ahead,” Vaillant Group proactively calls customers to confirm appointments. Previously, this needed to be done manually through looking up customers on Excel spreadsheets. This was an extremely labor- and time-intensive task, considering the hundreds of thousands of calls that Vaillant agents need to address. With Vonage Contact Center, the outbound dialer automatically makes the calls directly from the Vaillant Salesforce database.  This ensures that the right people are called at the right time using the right number, and has significantly streamlined the process. Naylor explains, “With Vonage Contact Center, agents don’t have to dial the number, so there’s no break in between calls. And dialing errors are reduced to zero”.  Vaillant claims that it has improved efficiency by 200%.

Call analysis from Salesforce reporting

The new VCC platform provides great insights into caller segments and their behaviors on calls. For example, Vaillant is now able to identify which customers and engineers call the most and what unnecessary internal calls are being directed through the contact center. The Vonage Contact Center reporting feature provides a marked improvement in efficiency. Additionally, the reporting uses CLID - a network-based class service of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) - so that calls can be prioritized from areas where engineers can provide immediate appointments.

Enhanced productivity and moving into a digital future

Vaillant agents have welcomed the shift to Vonage Contact Center. Committed to delivering a great customer experience, the service team members love the call ‘whispers’, which alert them to the purpose of the call before the customer comes on line. Utilizing the link to the customer record on Salesforce, agents are forewarned of repeat callers and long wait times. 

The Vonage cloud contact center is the first step in a Vaillant 6-stage plan to digitally revolutionize its service division.  Moving forward, Vaillant plans to employ self-service, e-mail, SMS, live-chat and engineer connectivity to further transform its business. According to Naylor, “We wanted future proofing, continuous improvement in the contact center technology without having to pay for it.”

Highlighting improvements to its service and gains made with Vonage Contact Center, the Vaillant contact center in the UK recently won the Vaillant Group Service Excellence Award.