Teleflora’s Contact Center Blooms Through ICMI's Professional Certification

Since its humble beginnings as a small “flowers-by-wire” service in 1934, Teleflora has blossomed into the world's largest florist network, with more than 15,000 member shops in the U.S. and Canada and 20,000 affiliates outside North America. Needless to say, adaptation to change has been essential to Teleflora’s success. But not since the transition from telegraph to telephone had the industry experienced a major shift in customer-side technology. Then came the Internet.

“We were trying to bring our customer access strategy to the 21st century, so the idea of how customers could interact with our contact center was going through a transition,” said Amas Tenumah, Vice President of Operations, Teleflora. “We were paving the way to bring Web 2.0 to our contact center. We wanted to ensure that we were doing all the right things for the company and our customers.”

That’s when Teleflora turned to ICMI’s Professional Certification program, powered by the CIAC (Call Center Industry Advisory Council). Available exclusively from ICMI – the leading global provider of comprehensive resources for customer management professionals for more than 25 years – Professional Certification delivers a standardized approach to contact center management, based on proven practices and principles.

“I was impressed that the program’s content was updated to accommodate emerging channels, such as social media and chat,” Tenumah said. “It really helped us define what we were trying to build at that point. We immediately started seeing benefits within the contact center.”

Before selecting ICMI Professional Certification, Teleflora considered other types of programs. “We evaluated other solutions, but found that the ICMI program, with its focus on taking each individual practitioner’s skill set to the next level, made the most sense for us,” Tenumah added.

As Tenumah soon realized, any contact center professional – including a seasoned veteran – stands to benefit from ICMI Professional Certification. “I describe myself as a contact center geek,” he said. “I can't overemphasize the fact that a lot of learning and eye-opening will come out of this process, and it also formalizes the training that so many of us receive on the job,” he continued. “It's invaluable from a validation and certification standpoint, and from an educational standpoint. ICMI Professional Certification is an opportunity to learn best practices, to jettison some bad practices and bad habits you've picked up over the years, and to rethink all of your assumptions about how a contact center should work.”

There’s no better time to start transforming YOUR center! Get more information about ICMI Professional Certification  and learn how YOU can get started.