Background: Established over eighty years ago, Dickies has grown to become the largest privately owned manufacturer of workwear in the world. Their UK head office at Midsomer Norton, near Bath, has a manufacturing facility capable of producing up to 6,000 garments per week and in 2002 a new Distribution Centre nearby was opened to bring total warehousing up to 115.000 sq ft. Despite this success the workwear market has become progressively more competitive in recent years and Dickies needed to ensure that they provided first class customer service to both new and existing accounts. Richard Chilcott, Managing Director, Dickies UK, "We have to be a smooth operator to exist in manufacturing in the UK today and wanted to improve our 'front end' interaction with our clients and capture customers in the sales process. The problem was that our communications system was not capable of providing the information that would enable senior management within the company to measure current performance let alone indicate where action needed to be taken to improve performance."

Why Callview? Reseller Datasharp Integrated Communications of Bristol was called in to offer guidance on a suitable system that would address the customer services issue as well as bring the overall communications of the company right up to date. Their Managing Director Martin Buckland commented, "We needed to ensure that we put in place a solution that would cost effectively meet Dickies overall requirements, including communications to and from the new distribution centre. As their existing communications systems was not capable of being upgraded to meet that need we therefore recommended the installation of a Siemens HiPath 3000 which would provide the right platform on which to integrate voice and data applications, including of course, Callview."

Callview is a modular application that affords the users sophisticated functionality but at the same time allows features to be added at a time to suit the business' requirements. Dickies elected to install the Callview Wizard MIS, five desktop wallboards and fifteen client licences. This meant that a full range of management information reports could be generated, both from existing supplied templates and bespoke customised reports. The wallboards are used by departmental managers to monitor performance in their own functional areas whilst Managing Director Richard Chilcott views performance across the entire company. The Client licences will be used to integrate Dickies existing Unix based customer service database so that upon receiving a call the client record would be displayed upon the sales or service representatives screen.

Benefits: Richard Chilcott, "Initially we were staggered by the amount of information that we could now obtain on our operation from Callview and were keen to establish the key parameters that we could use to measure performance and the procedures in place to evaluate the management information and reports generated. My reaction to having an 'at a glance' snapshot of activity within the company on my PC screen has really focussed my mind on how well we were handling our customers." Key performance indicators that Dickies are measuring include time to answer, lost calls and those calls ringing for over two minutes. Additionally Dickies will also be able to examine the impact of a recent directive they have made to their field based staff, in the light of recent government legislation, not to switch on their mobile phones at all whilst they are driving. Calls made to these switched off mobiles will now be diverted to internal sales office staff and reported upon by Callview so that management can ensure clients continue to receive prompt resolution to any queries they may have.

Bart Delgado, Managing Director of Swan Solutions commented, "Callview is a journey, not a destination. It is unlikely that Dickies perceived when they purchased Callview that they would use the application in this way and it is also interesting to note that some of the most successful implementations have resulted from installing a Desktop Wallboard on the Managing Directors PC."

Richard Chilcott, "A further benefit of using Callview is that we are now able to accurately measure the peaks and troughs of call patterns throughout any time period. In our business we can expect call volumes to rise considerable when the weather changes for the worse. Cold or wet spells result in our customers calling us for certain styles of clothing associated with prevailing conditions." Ongoing, Callview is constantly monitoring lost calls and is programmed to automatically prepare a missed call report for management to ensure, where calling line identity is available, that the call is promptly returned to the customer. "We now realise that on average we take a thousand calls a day and are comforted in the knowledge that Dickies has the technology to route those calls automatically to the right person best suited to take each call and measure all the parameters that contribute towards our achieving excellent customer service. As a measure of the success of Callview I should note that whereas I used to receive five calls a day from customers having difficulty communicating with our sales and customer services departments since installing Callview these calls have ceased entirely".

Additional Information

www.dickies-uk.co.uk - www.datasharp.co.uk - www.siemenscomms.co.uk