Vinomofo Celebrates Their Success With a Cloud Phone System

There's a lot of elitism in the wine industry, with experts keen to maintain its mystique. Online wine retailer Vinomofo works hard to break down the snobbery and make wine more accessible for everyday shoppers. That means using a reliable phone system for sales and customer service. After trying Aircall's service, the company immediately noticed reliability and efficiency, with a subtle hint of brilliance.

Vinomofo operates two distinct business units. Vinomofo.com is its e-commerce site, supported by customer service and sales teams who mainly handle inbound calls. Vinomofo prides itself on customer service, happily accepting returned bottles with no questions asked. This experience can't be delivered unless each agent is easily reachable on their own dedicated phone number.

The company's other unit, VinoDirect, takes customer experience to the next level. The wine dealers on its VinoDirect sales team sell directly to consumers on behalf of wineries. Dealers advise customers who have chosen the dealer experience, recommending wines that match their individual preferences and tastes. This requires a personal relationship between dealer and customer, with an even greater focus on customer experience.

VinoDirect’s sales team needs a phone system that supports mainly outbound calls to customers and tracks every customer interaction. It also requires a system with excellent call quality, reliability, and minimal downtime – if customers can't place phone orders with dealers, revenue from that channel drops to zero.

The responsibility for choosing that system fell to Vinomofo's Head of Engineering, Luke Cunningham. He leads the company's technical decisions and determines the technology platforms and tools Vinomofo uses.

"We're working on a full re-platform to a headless e-commerce architecture. This is something we've been working on for nearly two years now, and Aircall became part of that for us."

Vinomofo's previous PBX desk phones didn't meet its needs, offering little more than basic functionality. Their PBX system didn't integrate with their other tools, such as HubSpot. It couldn't track teams' phone activity, so it couldn't monitor communication trends to improve their teams’ performance.

Making the Move to Aircall

Cunningham knew the company needed a more advanced phone system, and it was the COVID-19 pandemic that finally forced the issue. When the crisis hit in early 2020, it was clear that Vinomofo’s existing desk phone system wouldn't easily support remote working.

"I had the option to have everyone unplug their hard phone and take it home. That meant the headache of people not having good internet at home and wondering if it would work at all," he said.

Cunningham looked at several solutions, but none of them ticked all the boxes. One competitor, for example, lacked certain basic features Vinomofo was used to. Vinomofo would have had to build these features themselves or use a complicated workaround. Instead, Cunningham chose Aircall, with full contact centre functionality straight out of the box. Within two weeks, Vinomofo had switched to their new system, with employees easily installing it on their devices and quickly learning how to use its intuitive interface.

Employees could access Vinomofo's new phone system from anywhere with an internet connection, allowing them to work from home easily. It also offered better call quality than the company's old solution, proved more reliable, and even resulted in some cost savings – Luke estimates that Vinomofo saved around $100,000 by switching to Aircall.

"We've had very good uptime with our phone since moving to Aircall—much more than we had with our hard phones, which always seemed to be broken,"

Aircall also gave Vinomofo deep insights into its customer communication patterns. Now teams can quickly access metrics such as the number of inbound and missed calls, as well as trends in team members' performance. Feeding this data into its Domo business intelligence platform provides insights that help streamline workflows.

Dial C for Configuration

Aircall’s cloud-based phone system also gives Vinomofo new levels of control over its phone system. Team members can adjust settings and reconfigure IVR and call routing themselves through the dashboard and Aircall app, without needing to contact IT. This allows them to easily, quickly, and at any time, adapt the system to their communication needs. A support ticket is no longer needed for Vinomofo’s teams to create a new phone number for a new joiner. Now, Vinomofo can handle the task itself in just a couple of clicks, straight from the Aircall dashboard. For teams that handle lots of inbound calls, that's a real blessing.

Aircall also integrates natively with HubSpot. Vinomofo connected the two services using Aircall's one-click integration and public API. Aircall logs each call automatically in HubSpot, allowing agents to focus on value-adding customer service tasks and adding call notes.

"Aircall's HubSpot integration allows us to segment recently called customers so we don't re-call them," Cunningham said. He added that they also use it to track engagement—or lack of it: "For example, if someone doesn't pick up the phone, we'll stop calling them."

Vinomofo also integrates Aircall with Postcall, allowing them to easily carry out customer experience surveys after calls.

After lockdown, Aircall's cloud-based system removed VinoMofo’s need for network cables and an expensive pack-up and set-up process when moving to new offices.

This is just the start of a growing partnership between Vinomofo and Aircall. Cunningham expects to make further use of Aircall’s integrations and Public API in the future as it redevelops much of its infrastructure from scratch. For example, Aircall’s BigCommerce integration will be useful when Vinomofo adopts BigCommerce as its e-commerce platform in the coming months.

Using SMS in future will also allow them to be more flexible and personalised in their approach to customer interactions.

“We’re going to be using SMS – we’re just working out the strategy for numbers. That will really enhance the personal communication we can have with customers and will hopefully have a big impact on revenue from those channels. Because if a customer can’t answer the phone, they’re more likely to be able to reply to an SMS.”

Vinomofo's successful use of Aircall is partly due to a close alignment between the two companies. Just as Vinomofo demystifies wine, Aircall cuts through the jargon to offer simple, affordable cloud-based phone services. The year the two joined forces turned out to be a great one for Vinomofo. A truly excellent vintage.

Find out how to choose the right phone system for your organisation in this free guide to cloud-based phone systems.