Travis Perkins.

The business need.

Travis Perkins plc is the UK’s largest distributor of building materials in the UK. With 20+ businesses in the Group, Travis Perkins has grown to over 28,000 employees across more than 2,000 branches, stores and sites around the UK. It supports them via a centralised HR function that provides a full breadth of HR services to all 28,000 employees.

Travis Perkins HR’s first-line support platform consists of two specialised teams: Employee Relations and “My People Service”. Both teams use the same telephony platform, which was creating a series of challenges.

Because the previous supplier’s technology was not fully compatible with the company’s newer solutions , this led to a lack of stability, which resulted in lost productivity from outages. There was limited flexibility to add new services or announcements, while allocation of call flows to new or existing numbers was complex – meaning the HR team frequently had to turn to external specialist help for what should have been straightforward tasks.

To address these challenges, in 2017, Travis Perkins appointed Connect to deliver an Amazon Connect powered contact centre.

The solution.

The Connect team engaged with the HR Service Centre management and operations teams to map out the ideal experience for their end customers.

Using a proven, agile approach, Connect was able to rapidly deploy the desired IVR and routing profiles within Amazon Connect, while upskilling agents, supervisors and managers on the effective use of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) desktop and reporting tools.

Connect also identified that the Service Centre management team was heavily reliant on a wallboard with a preferred view and list of statistics to drive operational productivity. Connect was able to transform this, using the real-time information and data feeds from Amazon Connect to provide a more up-to-date and relevant set of data. In less than six weeks, the Connect team developed a fully customised wallboard that leveraged the wider AWS services stack like EC2, Lambda and Kinesis Streams.

Outcomes.

The Travis Perkins HR department now has a highly resilient contact centre system that provides consumption-based billing – more accurate and easier to forecast. A new bespoke wallboard details the agents’ status and the contact centre KPIs in real-time.

Travis Perkins now has the flexibility to manage the contact centre without specialist external help, scaling up and down to support internal projects, developing call flows and activating new numbers/options.