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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/retailandleisure/0,3800011842,39169190,00.htm

Hughes Electricals automates online enquiries
Shoppers put in the picture by vast FAQ database

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Friday 16 November 2007

Hughes Electricals has added an automated customer enquiries service to its website, halving the staff resource needed to answer customers questions over the crucial Christmas period.

The electrical goods retailer operates 34 stores and five service centres throughout East Anglia.

The family owned company's annual sales in 2006 were £50m, with around £13m coming from its website, Hughes Direct. Christmas is when the retailer has its highest density of sales with about 40 per cent occurring in the 11 weeks between mid-November and the first week of January.

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Hugues Direct general manager Simon Cox said: "I expect 220,000 customer enquiries in November alone. The real surge will be from 10 to 18 December and Boxing day, where traffic numbers are going to be huge."

Cox told silicon.com that over the last four Christmases, customers have been relying on the site more heavily to ask questions about products and services. The majority of these enquiries were simple questions asked over and over again.

This year, Hughes Direct has installed an application called Metafaq from Transversal, which builds up a database of questions and answers as customers' enquiries are dealt with. The service was set up at the beginning of October with a base of 350 FAQs, which has increased to more than 700 since then. As a result email enquiries that need to be dealt with by staff have fallen by 40 per cent.

The impact on Hughes direct customer service has been to free up experienced customer service staff for more complex enquiries often dealt with over the phone.

Cox said: "We have a phone service which aims to answer 80 per cent of calls within 30 seconds. Over Christmas that generally falls to around 65 per cent. This year we are still up to 89 per cent in the middle of November."