The absence of a unified CRM across Rheem's eight contact centers resulted in inefficiencies, duplicate data entry, and limited reporting visibility.
Rheem implemented Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Customer Service, integrating telephony, case tracking, and knowledge base tools.
Call times dropped by 14%, CSAT scores improved, escalations decreased, and reporting visibility reached 100% with Power BI dashboards.
To support a technology modernization effort and consolidate contact center solutions, Rheem Manufacturing implemented Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Customer Service, which give contact center agents centralized case management and customer support capabilities. With its new solutions, the company has streamlined case management to help reduce average call times and create a better experience for customers.
“Dynamics 365 gives us cohesive capabilities through the concept of a customer engagement platform. We’re providing a better customer and employee experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and through this we’ll be able to connect our customer data into Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights – Journeys.”
Brian White, IT Director, Customer Experience, Rheem Manufacturing
14% improvement in average call-handling time
Rheem, a privately held company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with more than 50 brands globally, is the largest manufacturer of water heating products in North America and the only manufacturer in the world that produces heating, cooling, water heating, pool and spa heating, and commercial refrigeration products. An innovator and industry leader for the past 100 years, Rheem manufactures both residential and commercial products.
Rheem has eight contact centers across North America, where hundreds of agents manage more than two million calls per year. Agents help customers with product orders and warranty status information as well as general and technical questions. Because Rheem has grown by acquisition, it did not have a common technology solution for all of its contact centers. Many of the centers used SugarCRM, a cloud-based customer relationship management system, while others managed customer cases with Microsoft Outlook email and Excel applications. “We were maturing as an organization and had recently embarked on a digital transformation journey,” says Brian White, IT Director, Customer Experience. “We wanted a modern customer engagement platform that could scale with us and give us a single view of a customer. We needed a more efficient solution that could easily integrate with our sales and marketing and ERP environments.”
Rheem also wanted to unify its reporting capabilities and reduce manual duplicate data entry for agents.
Rheem decided to implement a new digital contact center solution based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 technologies including Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Customer Service. “We went through an extensive technology evaluation process, and we selected Dynamics 365 because it provides the cohesive capabilities we need for today and for the future,” says White. “We used Microsoft technologies internally for many years and we are migrating some of our platforms to Microsoft Azure, so stepping into Dynamics 365 allowed us to expand our relationship with Microsoft and have everything in the same ecosystem.”
Rheem began its implementation by moving the SugarCRM system to Customer Service and adding a connector from the Rheem Genesys telephony environment to Dynamics 365 Contact Center. The company uses Dynamics 365 to track customer issues through cases and record all case-related interactions, use unified routing to efficiently route work items, manage customer conversations across email, chat, and voice channels, and share information in the Rheem knowledge base.
Rheem implemented Dynamics 365 as a pilot project in the Heat Transfer Products Group (HTPG) for about 30 contact center agents. After the pilot went into production, Rheem expanded Dynamics 365 to seven additional business units in the United States and Canada. “Starting the implementation at a business unit which had a call center without a CRM to manage customer cases helped us optimize the other rollouts,” says White. “It helped us build the muscle internally for change management, develop training and minimize risk.”
To gain additional efficiencies, Rheem began implementing Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help contact center agents automate time-consuming tasks such as searching for product and case information. Agents use the solution’s case summarization feature as well as the timeline highlights feature, which helps summarize key developments from calls, emails, notes, and conversations.
“With Dynamics 365, our team has a single pane of glass with all customer information and tasks in one place,” says Jordan Bond, Senior Manager, Product Owner, Dynamics Service, Rheem. “The Rheem knowledge base within Customer Service also gives agents fast, easy access to specific product information during customer calls.”
Agents also have a more comprehensive understanding of customers because Dynamics 365 brings together customer marketing and sales information.
“With Dynamics 365, our team has a single pane of glass with all customer information and tasks in one place. The Rheem knowledge base within Customer Service also gives agents fast, easy access to specific product information during customer calls.”
Jordan Bond, Senior Manager, Product Owner, Dynamics Service, Rheem Manufacturing
Rheem contact center agents are more efficient with Dynamics 365, which is leading to a better experience for customers and helping the company meet its goal of improving average call-handling-time without sacrificing the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score and net promoter score (NPS). “Our goal is to continually improve average call-handling-time and we're seeing those times reduced with Dynamics 365,” says Adam Schuster, Director, Customer Experience, Rheem. “We’re on track for a 14% total improvement in average call-handling-time and we are starting to see CSAT scores trending up in some of our contact centers.”
Rheem is also seeing a reduction in customer call escalations because of automation and efficiency. “When customers call about a warranty or a technical issue, they sometimes have a better chance of resolving the issue in the first call as opposed to being escalated to a second or third call because of the streamlined case management capabilities we have in Dynamics 365,” says Schuster.
The company also modified its interactive voice response (IVR) solution to give customers self-service capabilities. “If a customer is just looking for the status of a warranty, they don’t necessarily need to call an agent,” Schuster says. “Up to 20 percent of our incoming calls are about warranties, and we’re deflecting about six percent of those calls for water products and five percent for air products. That frees up agents to answer other high-priority calls.”
“Our goal is to continually improve average call-handling-time and we're seeing those times reduced with Dynamics 365. We’re on track for a 14% total improvement in average call-handling-time and we are starting to see CSAT scores trending up in some of our contact centers.”
Adam Schuster, Director, Customer Experience, Rheem Manufacturing
Rheem is also using Microsoft Power BI dashboards to improve contact center reporting. Rheem contact center agents can see critical customer data from the telephony system at a glance. “With the improved reporting, agents can check the dashboards to see their performance or how their CSAT score is,” says Schuster. “Managers can also use the dashboards to monitor and track performance. We went from having very little reporting visibility to having 100 percent visibility with Dynamics 365 and Power BI.”
Next up, Rheem expects to complete the implementation of Dynamics 365 for its two remaining contact centers. The company will also roll out Dynamics 365 Sales for multiple sales teams across the company and integrate its Oracle CPQ solution into Dynamics Sales to more effectively track sales opportunities. The company also wanted to use the Sales Qualification Agent in Dynamics 365 Sales to automate the lead qualification process.
Rheem also plans to implement Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys to further streamline processes and nurture customer relationships. “Dynamics 365 gives us cohesive capabilities through the concept of a customer engagement platform. We’re providing a better customer and employee experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and through this we’ll be able to connect our customer data into Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights – Journeys,” White says.
Looking ahead, Rheem will use a new Copilot feature to automatically suggest email templates to contact center agents. “We have hundreds of email templates, and this feature can drive further efficiency because agents will be able to quickly choose a template and send an email as soon as a customer case is finished. When we initially started our modernization initiative, one of our goals was to improve the customer and employee experience,” says White. “I believe we’re achieving that goal with Dynamics 365, and we look forward to building on that.”
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