Express Gifts

About Express Gifts
Express Gifts is a home shopping and mail order business which has been established for over 40 years. It’s part of the Findel plc Group and operates under brands including Studio and online arm, 24Studio, serving in excess of 1.5 million customers.

Why did Express Gifts choose to work with KC Contact Centres?
Express Gifts needed fast and flexible support from a company it could trust to handle a predicted surge in telephone orders during the festive season. In the 8 weeks running up to Christmas, they needed to very quickly increase their capacity by around 300% in order to efficiently answer a huge volume of calls, ensure that no potential sales were lost and to maintain excellent service levels.

How has KC Contact Centres been able to help?
KC Contact Centres specialise in short to medium term campaigns and was able to almost instantly boost Express Gifts capabilities just when they needed it most.
Within a week, Express Gifts moved its core IT and communications equipment into KC Contact Centres’ operation in Hull and this enabled KC Contact Centres to quickly and cost effectively access Express Gifts’ sales order system. Front and back office procedures could then be fully integrated, allowing the contact centre team to actually order goods as they were taking customer orders rather than merely escalating them for processing.

Within 7 days the whole operation was up and running. KC Contact Centres had rapidly recruited a team of 70 call centre agents and worked in partnership with Express Gifts’ own training team to deliver a robust training programme to provide complete support and ensure continuity of call handling quality. KC Contact Centres also took measures to manage peak call flows by setting up a system that seamlessly re-routed any overflow calls to its contact centre in Hull.

KC Contact Centres’ Contact Centre Manager, Tony Jopling, commented, “We understood how important it was to ensure that customers could get through as quickly as possible to place their orders – any customer frustrations would inevitably mean lost business. We set up a system that was specifically designed to cope with very high call volumes and optimise sales”
The end result was that 96.7% of calls were successfully answered in 20 seconds and Express Gifts achieved the sales levels they had hoped for. 

Key benefits of KC Contact Centres
Consistency of brand values – The ability to quickly and effectively integrate our people into ‘your way of doing things’ so that they become a true extension of your own team and provide a seamless service to your customers.

Flexible resourcing – The structuring of the KC Contact Centres is specifically designed to provide just the right level of resource at just the right time. For you, this means improved cost efficiencies and an improved service offering.

Ready and waiting - Whether you have a one-off requirement and want to avoid the costs associated with temporary recruitment or, you simply want to directly benefit from attractive economies of scale by tapping into our shared pool of skills and resources, KC Contact Centres provides the solution. Reactive, responsive and run by a highly trained ‘ready-to-respond’ team, KC Contact Centres specialise in meeting a diverse range of challenges and supporting your operations, all day, every day.