“Vertu Motors was already moving forward with digital acceleration, but the pandemic meant we had to put our foot on the accelerator.”

David Crane, Chief Operations Officer at Vertu Motors.

Vertu Motors is one of the UK’s great retail success stories. They have over 160 retail locations and sell more than 200,000 vehicles a year and service another 600,000 more.

Every single day, Vertu’s 6000 employees have thousands of customer phone calls and hundreds of in person customer interactions.

But like most other industries, Vertu’s customers are moving online. And while Vertu’s customers are still coming into physical dealerships, they’re researching, comparing prices, and taking actions by themselves online well before they ever set foot inside a dealership or talk to a salesperson.

For Vertu and thousands of other businesses just like them, this poses a real problem.

And that problem is when customers call, they are all treated in exactly the same way (no matter what previous interactions they have had with the brand). Customers are pushed through the same IVR, where they are asked to fill forms out, over and over again. This is done to try and figure out who they are, and what they might want.

This is repetitive, and of no value to the customer and a terrible user journey. The problem is that most contact centres and phone systems are largely blind to a new modern, digital or hybrid customer journey.

Ideally, when a customer calls, the company would know what that customer has already seen, what information the customer has already provided, and what products and services the customer has shown interest in. That way the customer can be sold to, by the right skilled resource, with the aim to improve sales conversion and upsell and cross sell products and services.

We aim to capture all customer interactions in a single conversation and then make that conversation accessible to every single one of Vertu’s 6,000 employees right across the organization.

Then every employee has insight, and therefore the ability to have a value led and intelligent conversation (via the channel of choice) with the customer.

Our first step was to build this single view of the customer conversation on Twilio. By using Twilio Segment, Vertu is able to capture website visits, email traffic, and other customer interactions into a single view of the customer. Then, by adding in Ciptex RACE and Twilio Flex as their Contact Centre as a Service solution, Vertu is able to use all of that customer information captured in Twilio Segment and surface it when required.

Vertu’s 400 contact centre agents can now see what the customer has been doing, who they’ve been talking to and what they’ve been saying, and other key information about the customer’s journey.

The result is that Vertu’s contact centre agents are more knowledgeable, so customers get a much better experience. And as a company, see a dramatic improvement in successful business and customer outcomes.

But what about the rest of the business?

What about when customers talk to the other 6,000 employees at Vertu who are not contact centre agents?

These are the salespeople, the service people, and all the other employees in the back office.

Step two was then to use Spoke Phone to connect the other 6,000 Vertu employees in the back-office and give them access to the same rich customer journey information and insights.

This magic is made possible because Spoke Phone is a cloud phone system built on Twilio that is designed for connecting back-office employees to customers.

By connecting Spoke Phone to Ciptex RACE and Twilio Flex, Vertu was able to replace their legacy system on Prime Cisco phone system, get a modern cloud contact centre and phone system all on one platform.

Twilio, seamlessly connects the front office contact centre to the back-office teams, and drive a 15 times increase in the number of people who can now provide truly great customer outcomes.

David Crane, chief operations officer at Vertu Motors, commented, “This has not been a shift from analogue to digital: Vertu Motors was already moving forward with digital acceleration but the pandemic meant we had to put our foot on the accelerator. Because of COVID-19, things that would have taken months became an immediate priority so we could continue to meet the needs of our customers and our business. With the model we’ve implemented, our customers tell us they can’t believe how easy it is and we’re delighted to have been able to build a simple solution to a complex problem that’s delivered clear value. As we look ahead to what may come in the next year, it’s clear that, whatever happens, the great strides we’ve made create solid foundations on which we will continue to build.”

Ciptex designs, builds and implements cloud communication solutions. We focus exclusively on helping customers maximize the potential of the Twilio platform.

Ciptex is a Gold consulting partner and over the last three years we’ve delivered over 50 Twilio Flex projects ranging from large enterprises such as Vertu to global sports teams such as Manchester United.

Like in the case of Vertu, Ciptex can provide end-to-end services and solutions that accelerate our customers time to market and reduce the risk that typically surround large scale transformations.