BrazilDogma Alares helps home retailer enhance its customer service
Strategy and design consultancy Dogma Alares has helped retail company Karaca ramp up its customer service operations, call center agents' capabilities and technology solutions to meet current trends – successfully cutting 30% of the latter’s customer complaint costs.
Karaca is a family company formed in 1973 as a wholesale distributor, which grew into a legacy brand of home products – cutlery, porcelain, appliances, etc. – in Turkey and worldwide. The brand leans towards brick & mortar sales through more than 1,000 sales points across Turkey.
When the pandemic-induced shift to online consumption took hold last year, Karaca – like many in the market – was overwhelmed by the boom in traffic on its ecommerce channels. A five-fold increase in online sales saw Karaca swamped with customer service requests (including complaints) and a climbing cost base. Experts from Dogma Alares were called in for advice.
“We needed a consultancy who could bring a diverse set of skill sets to the table and work with us to own the problem,” said Cennet Melis Uslukilinc – brand, marketing and corporate communications director at Karaca. Launched early last year, Dogma Alares is a digital-focused strategy consultancy with expertise in machine learning, service design and operational efficiency – among several others.
Customer service transformation
The Istanbul-based consulting firm set about its new assignment with a deep dive into the status quo at Karaca – honing in on key pain points and improvement areas.
The review yielded 19 key improvement initiatives – most notably the development of a dashboard for call-centre agents; automated back-end processes; a chatbot for customer support; redesigned interactive voice response technology; new case categorisation systems; and a revamped flow for customer notifications.
Improvements were delivered over six months, steered by a programme management office – also crafted by the consulting team. And the impact was tangible: aside from a 30% cut to customer complaint costs, Karaca was able to compress the customer journey and boost its capacity for automated processing.
“At the end, we enabled a seamless customer service experience both for customers and agents. While customers started to get faster response and resolution, employees increased their productivity with the help of a better designed system and technology,” added Uslukilinc.
According to board member Emre Karaca, the transformation sets the tone for future growth. “I now feel more confident that we can scale up our customer service operations in the face of dramatic traffic increase in our channels.”
