Wine Country Gift Baskets— delighting customers with beautiful gifts and superior service

Every holiday season, Wine Country Gift Baskets needs an outsourced call center to handle nearly 60,000 calls during a six-week period, make all its customers feel like family, make so few errors that the rate is not even measurable, and add incremental sales revenue at nearly twice the rate of its internal call center. And every year, the company they call is Global Response.

Excellent Performance Confirmed by ACD Reports

Located in Fullerton, California, privately held Wine Country Gift Baskets has been manufacturing and selling value-priced, quality gift baskets to consumers and businesses for over 25 years. The company’s beautiful gourmet food, wine, fruit, flowers and spa gifts are available through its catalog and website. Wine Country Gift Baskets operates distribution centers throughout the United States, and ships to all 50 states. The Wine Country Gift Baskets brand also includes Cookie Gallery, which offers a wide selection of fresh-baked, handcrafted cookies and baked goods.

Prior to engaging Global Response, Wine Country Gift Baskets was using an outsourced call center but not receiving satisfactory service. After interviewing several candidates and visiting call center sites, the company selected Global Response. “At every call center we visited, I asked for an ACD [automatic call distribution] report for the prior day to put them, ‘on the spot’. Doing this makes it difficult for any call center to massage data and misrepresent themselves,” says Richard Germann, Contact Center Director for Wine Country Gift Baskets. “You can tell immediately from the report how well a center is run, and Global Response’s reports looked great: Calls were answered within three seconds, were handled within service level parameters, and abandons were very low.”

“On a personal level,” adds Hilarie S, Director of Training and Employee Development for Wine Country Gift Baskets, “our team were greeted like family by executives like Wendy and Herman Shooster and felt welcome from the very first meeting. We could tell they were ‘go-the-extra-mile’ people, because they’d decorated their offices with grapevines and were wearing purple shirts in honor of our visit.”

Given Global Response’s location in south Florida, the Wine Country team had some concerns about business continuity and possible disruption from hurricanes, but they went away after the site visit. “We toured the facility and saw it was very modern,” he says. “They are extremely well prepared for the possibility of heavy weather with their own power supply, backup power, steel shutters, and a headquarters building elevated off the ground in case of flooding. They really built their facility for south Florida.”

Every holiday season, Wine Country relies on Global to handle nearly 60,000 calls flawlessly all while treating the customer like family.

Rapid Implementation, Great Communication

Global Response has now been handling order entry each holiday season for several years for Wine Country Gift Baskets. During the most recent six-week peak period, Global Response Brand Care Specialists handled nearly 60,000 calls. “We couldn’t handle the holiday call volume without them—they handle about 20 percent of our volume,” says Germann.

To prepare for the holiday season each year, the dedicated group of about 160 Global Response specialists receives two full days of training, which is a refresher course for as many as a third of them, who are returning from previous years. “We used to send our trainers there, but now we use their trainers because our confidence in them is so high,” says Germann. “That saves us the cost of flying trainers from California to Florida each year. The training goes smoothly, partly because there’s such low turnover: We’ve had the same account manager for several years and the same trainers. We know and trust all the people there and they know us.”

Wine Country Gift Baskets uses another outsourced call center in addition to Global Response, and each year, both must make the same technical preparations to accept calls. “It’s an involved process to port the data, make the phone connections, and so on,” says Germann. “And yet, year after year, Global Response is up about a month earlier than the other outsourcer. We start the process and three days later we’re done because they have their whole account team on the call, including the account manager, IT staff, and telecom experts. Their level of communication is fantastic. What takes a good deal of back-and-forth with the other center takes one conference call with Global Response.”

“What also makes them stand out is how responsive they are to our requests,” says Hilarie. “For instance, I’d call and say ‘I know I told you I needed 112 people, but I actually need 142. When can you make that happen?’ They’d always get back to me right away with an answer. Or I’d call to request a change to the format or content of a report and the next day, the report would be changed. They never left me hanging, whether it was the project manager, the IT team, or Max and Wendy at the top—at all levels I would get an immediate response. I always felt like I was number one.”

Benefits of an Extremely Low Error Rate

Germann says one of the key benefits Global Response delivers is an extremely low error rate. “We don’t want our customers calling to place an order, then receive an order confirmation email later with errors on their order,” he says. “Errors promote call backs for order re-dos and erodes our customer’s confidence with our business. Global Response has a very high order entry accuracy rate.”

The business benefits of that accuracy and attention to detail include greater customer satisfaction, more repeat business, and significant cost savings. “The low error rate helps us meet our goal of a ‘one and done’ interaction with customers,” says Germann. “We don’t want a customer to call us, get an email confirmation with an error, and then have to call us back. That extra call costs us money—each call costs about $7. Because we get that ‘one and done’ performance from Global Response, our agents, instead of being tied up fixing an order that went out yesterday, can take another, more important call—a revenue-generating sales call.”

Scoring 99.2 Percent on the QA Scale

Global Response Brand Care Specialists also boost revenue for Wine Country Gift Baskets by connecting with customers and skillfully upselling attractive products. “We ask the agents to help incremental sales by promoting a specially priced gift basket at the end of each call,” says Germann. “The Global Response agents do that very skillfully and successfully: Their results were nearly the same as my internal staff’s, and we have twice as many people.”

Hilarie says that “all the Global Response employees, during the period of the year that they worked on our account, felt they were working for Wine Country. I’d go visit and they would use ‘we’ and not ‘they’ when talking about our company. Global Response encourages its specialists to become members of the client’s team, and it was clear they did that. Their staff handled our business as though they were us.”

Germann says that the Wine Country Gift Baskets internal QA staff monitors transactions throughout the day, and Global Response agents are critiqued on 22 components of a call. “They score an outstanding 99.2 percent on our QA scale,” he says. “Global Response is simply the best.”