Connecting Everyone in the Business to achieve 10X more Customer Outcomes

Personalising the car-buying experience with Ciptex RACE, Twilio Flex, Twilio, Segment and Spoke Phone

About Vertu Motors

Vertu Motors is one of the UK’s great retail success stories. They have over 160 retail locations, sell more than 200,000 vehicles a year, and service another 600,000 more.

The Challenge

Every single day, Vertu’s 6,000 employees handle thousands of customer phone calls and hundreds of in-person customer interactions.

But like most other industries, Vertu’s customers are moving online. While customers still visit physical dealerships, they’re researching, comparing prices, and taking actions by themselves online well before they ever set foot inside a dealership or speak to a salesperson.

For Vertu and thousands of other businesses like them, this presents a real challenge.

That challenge is: when customers call, they are all treated the same way — regardless of their previous interactions with the brand. Customers are funnelled through the same IVR, repeatedly asked to fill in forms, just to figure out who they are and what they want.

This repetitive process adds no value to the customer and creates a frustrating user journey. Most contact centres and phone systems are still blind to the modern digital or hybrid customer journey.

Ideally, when a customer calls, the company would already know what the customer has seen, what information they’ve provided, and what products or services they’ve shown interest in. That way, the customer can be connected to the right person with the right skills — improving sales conversion, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities.

The Solution

The goal was to capture all customer interactions in a single conversation and make that conversation accessible to all 6,000 of Vertu’s employees.

Now, every employee has insight — and therefore the ability — to have a value-led, intelligent conversation (via the customer’s preferred channel).

Step one was to build a single view of the customer conversation on Twilio. Using Twilio Segment, Vertu captures website visits, email traffic, and other customer interactions in one place. Then, by integrating Ciptex RACE and Twilio Flex as their Contact Centre as a Service solution, Vertu can surface that customer data as needed.

Vertu’s 400 contact centre agents can now see what the customer has been doing, who they’ve spoken to, what’s been said, and other vital insights into their journey.

The result: agents are more knowledgeable, customers enjoy a much better experience, and the business sees a significant uplift in successful customer outcomes.

Step two was to empower the rest of the business.

What about when customers speak with the other 6,000 Vertu employees — salespeople, service teams, and back-office staff?

Vertu used Spoke Phone to connect those employees and give them access to the same rich customer journey information.

This is possible because Spoke Phone is a cloud phone system built on Twilio, designed to connect back-office teams to customers.

By integrating Spoke Phone with Ciptex RACE and Twilio Flex, Vertu was able to replace their legacy Cisco phone system and implement a unified, modern cloud communications platform.

Twilio now seamlessly connects the front-office contact centre with back-office teams — resulting in a 15x increase in the number of people who can help deliver outstanding customer outcomes.

The Result

David Crane, chief operations officer at Vertu Motors, commented, “This has not been a shift from analogue to digital: Vertu Motors was already moving forward with digital acceleration but the pandemic meant we had to put our foot on the accelerator. Because of COVID-19, things that would have taken months became an immediate priority so we could continue to meet the needs of our customers and our business. With the model we’ve implemented, our customers tell us they can’t believe how easy it is and we’re delighted to have been able to build a simple solution to a complex problem that’s delivered clear value. As we look ahead to what may come in the next year, it’s clear that, whatever happens, the great strides we’ve made create solid foundations on which we will continue to build.”

Ciptex

Ciptex designs, builds, and implements cloud communication solutions. We focus exclusively on helping customers maximise the potential of the Twilio platform.

As a Gold Twilio consulting partner, Ciptex has delivered over 50 Twilio Flex projects in the past three years — from major enterprises like Vertu Motors to global sports teams like Manchester United.

In cases like Vertu, Ciptex delivers end-to-end services and solutions that accelerate time to market and reduce the risks typically associated with large-scale transformations.