An unreliable and insecure global telephony system was a significant business risk to fast-growing global retailer Lovisa until it was replaced with RingCentral, one of blueAPACHE’s global strategic partners within its emPOWER Voice solution offerings. Continuing to open more retail stores in more countries, Lovisa now has a rock-solid communications platform that can scale and innovate with the business.
| INDUSTRY
Retail |
HQ
Melbourne, Australia |
YEAR FOUNDED
2010 |
“blueAPACHE took into account our current state challenges and our future requirements and goals, recommending RingCentral as a proven solution with consistent global delivery and backed by referenceable blueAPACHE customers that had similar challenges and aspirations.” Matt Keegan, Head of IT Operations, Lovisa
KEY STATS
- A secure, reliable and feature-rich global telephony solution with a cost-neutral deployment
- Global deployment to 42 countries completed in 4 weeks
- Greater visibility and monitoring of calls; IT support services now seen as having positive impact
- Platform ready for future introduction of technical innovation and new features
Lovisa Holdings Limited (“Lovisa”) is an ASX-listed global specialist fast fashion jewellery retailer. Growing quickly since it launched its first store in April 2010, Lovisa currently has more than 870 stores in 42 countries. The company’s mission is to bring brilliantly affordable, on-trend jewellery to the world, whilst delighting its customers with its commitment to continually improve the Lovisa experience.
To support its global footprint, Lovisa operates a 24/7 Level 1 IT service desk in South Africa, and IT support centres to ‘follow the sun’ in Australia, China, Europe and the United States.
However, Lovisa’s rapid growth was putting a lot of strain on its IT systems and support services, particularly its telephony environment. Lovisa had rolled out a managed private cloud VoIP solution across its global SD-WAN that met its budgetary requirements but the solution was causing both reliability and security concerns. As a result, customer and IT support desk calls were frequently dropping out or not being connected, and most of Lovisa’s stores and staff were resorting to WhatsApp or email to communicate both internally and externally.
After attempting to remediate the telephony environment over several months, Lovisa made the decision to replace it completely.
“The system we were using was not reliable or secure; it had not been rolled out well; and it was not under control,” said Matt Keegan, Head of IT Operations, Lovisa.
Lovisa had a very specific set of requirements for the replacement telephony solution. It had to be secure, reliable, cloud-based, and capable of being deployed quickly to stores worldwide. It also had to provide call queuing, reporting and management functionality to support both Lovisa’s 24/7 service desk plus a new customer service centre it was setting up.
Lovisa approached IT services provider blueAPACHE as its trusted advisor, who recommended RingCentral’s RingEX cloud-based unified communications platform, one of blueAPACHE’s global strategic partners within its emPOWER Voice solution offerings, and confirmed that it was the ideal solution to meet Lovisa’s complex operational and functional criteria.
“blueAPACHE took into account our current state challenges and our future requirements and goals, recommending RingCentral as a proven solution with consistent global delivery and backed by referenceable blueAPACHE customers that had similar challenges and aspirations,” said Keegan.
42 COUNTRIES IN 4 WEEKS
blueAPACHE facilitated the introductions and workshops with RingCentral resulting in an agreed solution and transition approach.
In preparing for the cutover to RingCentral, one of the complicating factors was Lovisa’s ongoing growth. After assistance from RingCentral Professional Services and blueAPACHE with the configuration and design of the new system, Lovisa embarked on the deployment with its own internal team.
“During the rollout of RingCentral we had a lot going on. We were growing a retail store per day on average, somewhere in the world,” said Keegan. “The support from blueAPACHE, and RingCentral’s ease of deployment and cloud provisioning processes were great.”
Lovisa was able to complete the RingCentral deployment to all its offices and stores globally in four weeks. A key element to that speed was the decision taken to abandon its existing phone numbers and adopt a completely new numbering plan.
The other advantage was that the majority of Lovisa’s existing handsets were compatible with the new RingCentral platform. Lovisa’s deployment team was able to reconfigure all of its handsets remotely.
“A clean break was totally the way to go. We also renumbered our stores, so that our internal phone numbers are now actually the store number. Now we just ring a store because we know the store number and up it comes,”
Lovisa had to change its external store numbers online and in various search engines, but to keep to its aggressive rollout timeframes, that was far quicker and easier than attempting to port its existing numbers across.
Lovisa also set up basic call queuing for its 24/7 internal IT support call centre in South Africa, with agents working in three eight-hour shifts to support Lovisa’s global operations. A customer service centre was also established with local numbers around the world provided in a ‘follow the sun’ model. Previously, Lovisa had to rely on an international number for customer support.
GLOBAL NUANCES
Despite the speed Lovisa was able to achieve with the deployment, it wasn’t all smooth sailing, Keegan explains.
“Deploying global telephony is not as easy as it sounds. It’s not the same everywhere; most country has nuances or restrictions around their telephony. For example, while in Australia it’s easy to automatically provision numbers, in some countries VoIP is still illegal and in others we can’t have outbound numbers.”
That meant work-arounds in certain countries to ensure the same functionality and capability could be delivered to stores globally. As a result, all stores on the global Lovisa network are operating conventional local calling in and calling out services, and they can connect with head office and IT support centre.
IMPROVING IT TEAM’S PERFORMANCE
In upgrading to RingCentral, Lovisa now has a reliable and secure global telephony environment that is also delivering the functionality the business needs. When Lovisa completed a business case for the deployment, it was cost neutral. However, the biggest differences are being felt in the positive impact the new solution has had on internal operations, on store support, on employee and customer experience, and on reducing the administrative overheads in managing the system.
“The visibility into the call centre now is great. We are now able to report and monitor the calls coming in, we record our calls, and we coach our team regularly. RingCentral has empowered the IT team to measure our performance a lot better, and therefore improve it. And all the complaints we were getting from our retail stores that they couldn’t get IT support have turned around dramatically. People are now talking about the fact that IT is performing well,” said Keegan.
Now that Lovisa has a secure and reliable telephony platform in place, it’s looking to innovate and explore new functionality, including RingCentral’s AI capabilities and integration with Lovisa’s helpdesk ticketing system. Most importantly, RingCentral is there to support Lovisa’s continued global growth trajectory.
“We’d gladly be in every single busy shopping centre in the world,” concluded Keegan.