8×8 announced that Halfords, the UK’s leading retailer of motoring and cycling services and products, has expanded the company’s deployment of the 8×8 cloud contact centre and communications product to enhance communications and customer experience.
Halfords was focused on unifying communications and contact centre operations across their three main business divisions – retail, automotive and mobile services. However, their legacy on-premises communications infrastructure was a barrier to achieving this goal, with multiple systems and dated technology.
Halfords selected 8×8 due to platform scalability, flexibility and integrations with Salesforce and Calabrio Teleopti Workforce Management. Initially, Halfords deployed the integrated 8×8 contact centre and communications product across more than 700 locations to support 4,700 employees and contact centre agents.
Halfords worked with 8×8 to rapidly expand global customer engagement efforts, more than doubling the number of contact centre agents using 8×8 to over 750.
Halfords added a contact centre team in South Africa with more than 200 remote contact centre agents to support the largely digital retail operation. This allowed Halfords to minimise business disruption, while keeping agents safe and productive.
South Africa is one of the 42 countries where 8×8 provides full Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) replacement services and global calling plans, allowing organisations to easily scale operations as needs change.
Gareth Brophy, head of Customer Support at Halfords, said: “Partnering with 8×8 and deploying an integrated cloud contact centre and communications product, enables us to deliver a customer-first strategy, and scale our operations to drive efficiency and profitability.”
Jamie Snaddon, managing director of EMEA at 8×8, said: “As we support Halfords on their digital transformation journey to meet and exceed customer expectations, we look forward to helping them manage and optimise all employee and customer interactions across their multiple business divisions.”
