Holiday Prep: Burlington Coat turns to E.piphany
 
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This is the fourth in a series about retailers bolstering their Web sites in time for holiday sales. Read about Cabela's Web site re-launch, Kawasaki's accessories sales and Eddie Bauer's streaming videos. More retail stories to come.
At Burlington Coat Factory, last year's online shopping surge led to this year's seasonal technology upgrade: new customer service software from E.piphany to handle increased e-mail inquiries.
The E.piphany technology replaces what used to be a manual, time-consuming process of responding to customer e-mail. The old method relied on a single e-mail inbox that only one customer service agent could access at a time.
In the early days of its retail Web site, that system was good enough to keep up with the volume of customer inquiries Burlington Coat Factory received from Web visitors. But in 1999, the company significantly expanded its e-commerce range, adding credit card processing and a search engine to its retail site.
"We knew that was going to open the floodgates to a lot of business," says Ginger Atwater, director of e-business at Burlington Coat Factory. "And the more you sell, the more customer requests you get."
The retailer survived the 2000 holiday season using its e-mail-based system, but vowed not to go through another year without better tools to manage and quickly respond to customer service requests.
"Last January, I said we're not going to do this again," Atwater says. So Burlington Coat Factory shopped around and in June chose E.piphany's contact center software.
With the help of systems integrator FCW Consulting, the company implemented E.piphany Service Center in three months. The system went live in October.
Customer savvy
Burlington Coat Factory had no easy way of monitoring customer requests before E.piphany. In fact, the company didn't even have a central customer database, Atwater says.
Today E.piphany Service Center logs 200 to 300 e-mails each day, and that number increases to as many as 350 daily during the holiday season. Customer information is collected and stored in a central repository - instead of myriad e-mail folders - so Burlington Coat Factory representatives can view a customer's history while responding to an inquiry.
The system's E-mail management tools include: a universal queue that each customer service agent can access; automated response templates; alert mechanisms; and the ability to escalate inquiries to higher priority status, when necessary.
E.piphany's reporting tools help Burlington Coat Factory analyze contact center data and spot business trends, such as growth in special order items or an increase of late-shipment complaints.
The road ahead
From the start of its software search, Burlington Coat Factory wanted a vendor with which it could potentially develop a long-term relationship as the retailer grows its customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.
"Customer service is one piece of CRM," Atwater says. "We know we're going down that road."
Eventually, the retailer may use the information gleaned from E.piphany Service Center for marketing campaigns, for example. With E.piphany, Burlington Coat Factory has room to grow, Atwater says.
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