Brother Sales, Ltd. innovates call center with Oracle Service

The Brother Group offers a variety of products and services in the world. Brother Sales, Ltd., the marketing company for Japan, sells office equipment such as printers and multifunction devices, as well as sewing products, including sewing machines for home use.

To improve customer satisfaction, Brother Sales, Ltd. offers customer-friendly support via a call center and self-service website. The company is always looking for ways to help improve the lives of customers. In 2019, Brother Group began streamlining its entire business process by embracing cloud technology. Brother Sales, Ltd. is further expanding customer service support via digital transformation and reform work styles at the company’s call center.

Three things were paramount. First, the company wanted to ensure that the frequently asked questions (FAQs) prepared for customers were very detailed so that both individual B2C customers and corporate B2B customers could solve problems themselves with agility and efficiency.

Second, Brother Sales, Ltd. wanted to unify its customer inquiry database, which had been split into separate channels, and tighten customer information coordination between each channel.

Finally, Brother Sales, Ltd. wanted a secure and efficient cloud-based system that could promote telework while being easy for agents and other employees to use.

When searching for the best cloud service, Brother Sales, Ltd. gave FAQs the highest priority; the company’s focus on customer experience (CX) mandated that the FAQs be simple and easy to understand. Additionally, the system needed to handle ambitious CRM and omnichannel initiatives. The company wanted a single, centralized management system for customer information that could support the call center business effectively and efficiently.

After looking into a number of cloud offerings, Brother Sales, Ltd. decided on Oracle Service as the only solution that met all these needs.

What sealed the deal for Brother Sales, Ltd. was the superior knowledge management functionality Oracle offered—in particular, the high performance of Oracle algorithms that would allow Brother Sales, Ltd. to effectively optimize both external search engines and the engines on internal websites.

Migrating previous on-premises systems to Oracle Service allowed Brother Sales, Ltd. to hit its starting targets: streamlining customer service support to raise customer satisfaction and achieving work style reform in the call center. The FAQ functionality was oriented toward customers and served as a base of shared knowledge for internal agents. Customers can solve problems themselves online with increased accuracy and speed. Additionally, although Brother Sales, Ltd. had initially used separate on-premises and off-premises customer inquiry databases, unifying them into a single database slashed the time needed for database management by 50%.

Previously, inquiries from individual as well as corporate customers had been split across a number of channels, moving from FAQ to chat, and then to email if an issue still wasn’t resolved. Each channel in that system had to reference its own disparate data. But moving to an omnichannel approach using Oracle Service has allowed Brother Sales, Ltd. to unify management of all customer service data in a single system. This has reduced the time agents need to handle each inquiry. The average time a customer has to wait on hold when contacting the call center has been slashed by as much as 30 seconds.

Brother Sales, Ltd. had been promoting telework for agents who wish to work remotely, but the introduction of Oracle Service helped accelerate this goal. Additionally, the company had focused mainly on its B2C business, but a recent expansion to include B2B customers enables the call center to effectively manage both. Oracle Service provides the cloud-based omnichannel foundation the call center needs to help support all of its operations.