Kofola is one of the best-known and most popular soft drinks in Central Europe, and has managed to become the main rival to both Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the region. First developed in communist Czechoslovakia in 1959 as a way to utilize caffeine produced in the coffee roasting process, the Kofola brand has proven to be both beloved and enjoyed throughout the region. Kofola has set out on a major expansion in recent years that has taken it into markets such as Romania, Poland, Croatia, Lithuania, and others.
Enabling a personal touch in Kofola’s call center
Kofola previously used an external call center to handling phone orders from customers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for all of its brands. For a number of reasons, including the fact that the external call center did not allow Kofola’s sales team to have easy access to sales information, to reduce costs and to gather higher quality information about their customers, as well as to utilize internal information, Kofola engaged AspectWorks to analyse their business needs, then decided to create their own call center staffed by its own employees with the systems to support it.
Some of the requirements included that calls received in the call center needed to be converted into orders for fulfillment – requiring integration of order data with other systems used in the manufacturing process, including SAP – and that the system track agents’ KPIs based on orders. In addition, the time spent handling each order had to be decreased.
Kofola also wanted to be able to assign call center agents to individual clients to provide a more personalised customer service experience, one that enabled the retrospective view of customer data up to two years back. They required that the new system not only provide flexible and powerful call center management tasks, but also be expandable to support other features in the future.
Leveraging and integrating powerful systems
AspectWorks proposed a system that combined a PBX telephone platform with the Salesforce customer relationship management system to capture incoming phone call information and combine it with customer and order data. In addition, the new system allows call center agents to be assigned to individual clients, which provides for both improved customer service, as well as higher retention of agents. Leveraging Salesforce’s powerful customer relationship management functions, the new system also enables logic that allows call center agents to collect information about clients, including how often they want to be contacted. A scheduler in the system was built to track and assign call center agents for customer contact.
Increasing order volume while cutting costs
Since implementing the new system, Kofola has significantly increased the number of orders call center agents are able to handle while at the same time reducing costs compared to their previous external call center. Kofola is now able to handle more than 1,500 to 2,000 orders per day, with increases to 3,000 orders. The system also supports spikes of 3,700 to 4,200 calls per day, an increase of two to three times more calls than under the old system. The new system handles 25-30% of the company’s revenue through a call center with 30 employees.
The new system has also improved communication between the call centre and sales teams. If a salesperson is on a trip, for example, they can message the call centre agent and have the agent order specific products. Order and call data is also automatically exported from the call centre to Kofola’s data warehouse for further analysis and integration.
Implementation solutions
- Salesforce Lightning Service Cloud
- Integration with SAP
- Developed CTI integration with Kofola’s PBX system
- Integration with Limigo system used by sales reps
- Custom reporting – standard reporting, plus a custom page for call center managers/supervisors to see statistics in real time about calls in real time, how many calls are waiting, how many calls handled so far, agent statuses – who is at lunch, on break, etc
- Java application to export data from SAP to Salesforce, controlled and managed from Salesforce
- Common integration tool for working with any object and fields that are exported from SAP and need to be transferred and transformed for Salesforce
Value adds
- Ability to provide custom integration of existing systems, often integrating very different systems
- Understand the customer’s business very well
- Ability to create an easy to use environment for end users
