Since enhancing its customer experience via its backend transformation, Interflora Australia has seen an up to 20 percent reduction in contact centre calls.
The online florists and flower shops deliver flowers across Australia and have a network of over 750 flower shops
Through its Commercetools implementation, the florist company further boosted its contact centre training, relieved stock issues plus saw financial and logistics improvements, according to Interflora chief information officer Matt Hoskin.
Speaking to Digital Nation, Hoskin said the business saw results “from day one” following its whole digital transformation approach after recognising it needed to improve both the customer and staff experience.
He said the whole business uplift program included its ecommerce transformation to enable improved customer experiences and drive business growth.
“I’ve been with Interflora for two years and I was brought on specifically to lead them through their digital transformation.
“Previously to that they hadn’t spent a whole lot of money or effort on their IT infrastructure since about 2015.
“During that period and especially through Covid where they were extremely busy, they realised that their old, monolithic systems needed to be upgraded,” Hoskin said.
He explained they were experiencing “frequent outages through the website and the back of house systems” with a lot of “patching going on”, impacting the level of service staff could deliver.
“What that ended up meaning was that we started doing a lot of refunds to customers because we couldn’t fulfil orders anymore”.
The work shifted the company’s internal approach and saw all of its applications switched to new versions.
“There were a lot of aspects to this project. It was essentially three web applications that had to be designed and built.
“We had our customer-facing website where customers would come and place their orders. We had a florist application that florists would log on to accept orders, reject orders, manage their orders and set their different settings within the portal.”
He added there was also an internal corporate application as well.
“To give you a scope of that, there’s not a single application that we used six months ago that we’re using today. Absolutely every application is new. It’s a complete transformation from top to bottom.”
The work led to unexpected benefits and created a more seamless experience for its customers, according to Hoskin.
“We saw results from day one. Most importantly for our customers, it was just an improved customer experience,” he said.
“We now had a much more visually pleasing website. It was much more responsive; it was quicker, and it was a real more seamless experience for the customers also is very stable.”
He said since going live in December 2023, it hasn’t experienced any major outages, building consumer confidence in order fulfilment.
“Especially for our customer service team whose main job is to take phone orders but also to deal with customer complaints, queries, anything about the orders, as we went live, we saw an up to 20 percent reduction in calls and queries.
“A lot of that was because of these issues that the new system resolved for us.”
He added training for its contract centre staff previously “wasn’t that intuitive”, taking up to a week to onboard new members, compared to the two days it takes now.
Its transformation efforts also cover better communication between the consumer and their order, explained Hoskins.
“One of the most important requirements was being notified when an order came through. So now, we have SMS order notifications, so they’re able to log onto the portal and enable SMS order notifications.
“Every time they get an order to accept, they’ll get an SMS message to say you’ve got an order directly from that SMS.
“They can click on that SMS and accept the order directly from there because that application can be used on a desktop or a tablet or a mobile phone or any device. They’re also able to turn products on and off so they don’t receive orders that they don’t have stock for.”
Hoskin added team members also receive “up-to-date training and information” via the new portal, including “short little snippets of video training”.
“The florists told us they didn’t want a big PDF manual on how to use the system, so we have a whole fleet of videos, 40 to 60-second videos on how to log onto the system, how to accept an order, how to enable those SMS notifications, how to turn off products on an office as well.”
Hoskin added the upgraded system has also helped manage dynamic delivery fees and regional pricing.
“Previously, the customers would pay one set price, so it didn’t matter if their order was going to say Metro Sydney or, out in the middle of nowhere, they would pay one set fee.
“The florist, however, would charge us whatever that delivery fee was.
“A lot of those times in those regional or rural areas, the florist would charge us more than what the customers had paid so then Interflora would be subsidising those delivery costs.”
Under the new system, Interflora can “calculate on-the-fly a dynamic delivery fee”
“Therefore, the customer is paying the most appropriate delivery fee. The florist, when they accept that order, is getting paid the delivery fee of what it costs them to get that delivery to the customer and Interflora is no longer subsidising that delivery fee as well.”
Hoskin said the business will “continue to improve our checkout experience.”
“We need a lot of details to deliver. We need the sender’s details, the recipient’s details. We want to continue to improve that experience and look at more of a single touch purchase process.”
The company is able to deliver to over 400 countries, comprising of “45 other international units”, some of which have also taken up the new tools.
“There’s a lot of synergies. People sending orders from overseas or from Australia overseas. It’s just as good as an experience as they are sending it within Australia as well.”
AI “buzzword” and future moves
Hoskin added with AI “the big buzzword” of the moment, the team is looking into how they can use the technology to enhance Interflora’s business.
“It’s already snuck into our business through our internal collaboration tools.”
Hoskins said the capabilities are “taking away a lot of the noise and doing a lot of summaries for us” resulting in time saved internally.
He added it’s also “using something like conversational AI chatbots to take commerce from out behind the website and make it available to consumers, into other channels like Facebook or WhatsApp or things” to continue boosting the customer journey.
“There’s so many things now we’re able to do that we’re looking at and it’s just a matter now of refining what do we do first?”