CEWE

CEWE is Europe's leading photo service provider and innovative online printing partner. Eleven production sites in Europe are responsible for the manufacturing of orders, but in parallel they are also available for service requests by phone - both from business customers and end consumers. "CEWE's customer service was highly fragmented and decentralised: each production site operated its own customer service with its own telephone system for its own local customers," as Stephan Gürtler, Head of Internal Sales at CEWE Stiftung & Co. KGaA, describes the situation. "Added to this are three call centre service providers who support the phone service." Trade customers used to call the respective production sites via a long list different phone numbers, a procedure that worked for commercial customers but became a problem when CEWE PHOTO BOOK also became a household name for end consumers. The call volume from this customer group increased considerably and the uneven distribution of these calls also became a challenge, because the service level had to be maintained. "We wanted to avoid costly hardware installations, maintain our TC infrastructure as far as possible, involve the service providers and also introduce central reporting for all locations and service providers," says Gürtler, summarising the requirements. 

With the introduction of the ACD from VIER engage, a total of eight CEWE locations plus three service providers - one of them in Tunisia - are integrated in the call distribution. CEWE offers almost 20 different hotlines for the various customer segments and major customers. Calls from trade customers continue to be prioritised and delivered to the responsible employees on site via a geo-routing procedure, despite uniform telephone numbers. The ACD distributes end customer calls evenly among all locations and service providers using the longest-idle principle; depending on the season, up to 150 employees are deployed. In some years, over a million calls are successfully handled. The employees take care of order processing, provide a lot of advisory support for customers in the order process and help with questions about the products. 

To ensure service quality, CEWE carries out automatic, telephone-based customer surveys with the VIER Voice of the Customer. Following a service call, every third end consumer who answers the phone is offered the survey. "A good 30 per cent take part. In this way, we receive around 1,200 evaluations per month on the school grade principle," says Gürtler. If a question is graded poorly, customers can still record a reason, which Gürtler automatically receives by e-mail and forwards for clarification. "We can be satisfied: we achieve an overall grade of 1.4 to 1.5!" 

CEWE, founded in 1961, is Europe's leading photo service provider and innovative online printing partner. CEWE delivers its photo work at eleven locations via many well-known retail chains. The CEWE photo world is colourful: in addition to developing photos, it primarily comprises brand products such as the CEWE PHOTO BOOK as well as CEWE CALENDARS, CEWE CARDS, CEWE WALL PICTURES, gift articles and much more. Customers are supplied internationally - through cooperation with around 34,000 retail customers in 24 countries. The customers' points of contact are drugstores, specialist retailers and countless other sales outlets. 

Learn more: cewe.de