Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, today announced that Marks & Spencer has selected Twilio to power its customer communications across 640 locations and 13 UK-based contact centre hubs. The project to automate Marks & Spencer’s legacy switchboard operation took less than six months from concept to launch and will allow Marks & Spencer to analyse customer intent in real time for more than 12 million customer interactions annually.
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Today, when a customer calls any Marks & Spencer store, the company’s intelligent system immediately establishes what the customer is calling about and then routes it to the correct destination via Twilio. Marks & Spencer is also extending the services from Twilio, and will be rolling out delivery status updates via text message for its e-commerce customers, powered by Twilio Programmable SMS.
“Twilio’s flexible cloud communications platform has enabled Marks & Spencer to experiment like a start-up, while executing like an enterprise,” said Chris McGrath, IT programme manager at Marks & Spencer.
“We were able to prototype a solution in just four weeks and put it to the test during our busiest retail days of the year. The new solution has given Marks & Spencer an improved ability to have more direct and meaningful conversations with our customers, which also helps us reallocate valuable staff time. We’re excited to see where the platform takes us as we continue the roll out across our contact centres.”
Prior to partnering with Twilio, Marks & Spencer’s infrastructure was built on a mixture of legacy phone systems that could not support its digital strategy going forward. As a result, Marks & Spencer was unable to centralise customer information and could not seamlessly connect customers across its stores nationwide. As a part of the leading retailer’s digital transformation (DX) initiative, it began looking for an agile solution it could deploy across the entire business to enhance the customer experience (CX). In just four weeks, Marks & Spencer designed a Twilio-powered prototype that would automate the company’s existing switchboard and then put Twilio to test during a trial run on Marks & Spencer’s two busiest days of the year, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, where it handled more than 20,000 customer calls.
