Ritani Crafts Finer Customer Service with NewVoiceMedia

Founded in 1999 as a designer and manufacturer of engagement rings and fine jewelry, luxury jewelry brand Ritani has a unique process: clients can design a custom ring online and then elect to have the personalized piece shipped directly to their home or office, or to a local, independently owned jeweler for a free, in-store preview. It’s no small investment—the average price for Ritani’s jewelry falls in the several-thousand-dollar range—so fully meeting customer expectations is a top priority for the company, and having a reliable contact center management solution is a valuable part of that mission.

“This year, a big shift for us has really been about transforming that contact center into much more of a sales center—not only do we take care of customers, but we really try to give them advice on what to buy, whether it’s to possibly upsell them into other types of things, or to cross-sell them into additional things,” says Simon Tam, chief technology officer at Ritani. “It’s really just another source of revenue stream for us, but one that has a deep amount of touch from that customer service point of view.”

Until recently, Ritani’s system was expensive, with hardware to maintain, and in general unreliable, which added up to lost sales. So Ritani implemented NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld for Service solution, giving it a solution that was both cloud-based and could be integrated with Salesforce.com, uniting customer communications and customer data on one platform. Since the deployment, Ritani has seen a 30 percent increase in sales and saved 30 percent in annualized infrastructure costs.

“We started looking around at contact center management solutions—specifically ones that were cloud-based and ones that could integrate with Salesforce and build upon Salesforce—that would allow us to start moving key components of our contact center infrastructure into the cloud,” Tam says. “We were spending a bunch of money on physical hardware on-site that we really wanted to get rid of and rely purely on whatever cloud solutions existed out there.”

ContactWorld’s real-time reporting capabilities have been particularly effective in boosting sales efficiency. Previously, Ritani had to wait two to three days to generate reports for its president. Furthermore, ContactWorld generates reports for each customer service agent, increasing productivity by driving competition between agents, and enabling managers to provide more targeted support.

Ritani has also seen improvement in continuity of service after implementing ContactWorld. Ritani no longer has to worry about maintaining quality customer service during, say, power outages—the cloud-based solution allows calls to be routed to any phone or device with an Internet connection. The company can maximize sales because the system is dependable.

Tam emphasizes ContactWorld’s high adoption and multitude of features, saying that the solution is “very easy to use, largely because it is predicated off of Salesforce,” and that Ritani “didn’t have to pay for extra capabilities such as reporting [and] voice recording.”

In the future, Ritani plans to take advantage of new innovations from NewVoiceMedia. Because ContactWorld is cloud-based, Ritani can implement new features with a single click as soon as they are introduced. 

The Payoff

After implementing NewVoiceMedia's ContactWorld for Service, Ritani has seen:

• a 30 percent increase in sales;
• a 30 percent savings in annualized infrastructure costs; and
• an increase in overall reliability.