Avaya is working with Tuhu.com, a B2C automotive maintenance ecommerce service platform in China, to deliver a new contact center for a better ecommerce customer experience.

After rapid growth in recent years, Tuhu’s business now covers 395 cities across China including more than 10,000 stores. Call volumes at its customer service centers have also risen rapidly, which put the old system under increasing pressure. Chinese shopping festivals brought additional challenges with sudden increases in demand for service during peak periods.

“For ecommerce companies in China, customer experience has become the focus of competition,” said Chen Wei, managing director for greater China at Avaya.

Tuhu chose to deploy Avaya contact center solutions and effectively connect the two customer service centers located in Shanghai and Wuhu in Anhui Province. Avaya Professional Services provided consulting, implementation, operation and maintenance services throughout the project. From design, customization, deployment to full operations, the whole project took only one month.

“Since the project was completed in a very short time, we did not feel any business disruption due to the upgrade,” said Yu Bing, IT director of Tuhu. “Tuhu is in a rapidly changing industry, which requires us to quickly respond to market changes and customer needs, and provide the best services in the industry. The new contact center platform will help us achieve these goals.”

Since the deployment, operational and service efficiency has increased significantly. The number of customer service agents increased from 100 seats to 450, with the capability to expand to up to 5,000 seats in future. Tuhu puts great value on stability and the Avaya solution can achieve 99.999 percent reliability. Even during the shopping festivals or sales-promotion periods, Tuhu’s customer service center still achieves efficient operation. Pre-sales consulting, order confirmations, customer visits and other services can be conducted in a very organized way.

Tuhu plans to add more application modules to the current customer service platform in the future as it builds an omnichannel contact center. No matter what channel customers use to contact Tuhu, they will receive a consistent service experience. User interaction data obtained from different channels will be analyzed and managed in a unified manner. The customer service center system can also connect to Tuhu’s customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, so that Tuhu can refine the management of customer relationships based on analysis of data and draw dynamic profiles of customers, providing accurate, proactive, and personalized service for them.

In addition to Avaya Professional Services, Tuhu deployed a total contact center solution from Avaya including routing, workforce management, recording and, self-service, as well as Avaya Aura and virtualization solutions.