Charles Tyrwhitt

Charles Tyrwhitt was started in 1986 by Nicholas Charles Tyrwhitt Wheeler, who founded the company because he was confident that he could make a shirt better than anybody else. The company has many retail stores throughout the UK, as well as in New York and Paris. As the company expanded, its old site-based PBX and contact centre started to buckle under the strain and it became clear that a more flexible solution was required in order to cope with high levels of customer demand at peak times without relying on a traditional PBX maintainer.

How Charles Tyrwhitt shirts is using CardEasy

Syntec has been a supplier of telecommunications services to Charles Tyrwhitt for many years, providing its numbering and carrying its calls, including internationally. In addition to management of its call traffic, Syntec was asked by Charles Tyrwhitt asked to help with its call center management using Syntec’s AgentCall and SIP-hosted contact center solutions.

The company wanted to replace its existing on-site call center solution with a distributed contact center solution, but with no disruption to its business during the changeover. The new system would need to provide real time agent status across multiple sites in order to make better use of agents’ time. The company also wanted to reduce the number of ISDN lines needed and move to SIP.

The solution

Syntec’s AgentCall platform and state-of-the-art reporting suite addressed the company’s contact center needs, providing cloud-based agent reporting, queue management and IVR at the network level. The system offered central visibility and flexible call control, all via a simple web-based interface. The company was able to tailor reports to its specific needs. As AgentCall works with legacy PBX systems the solution could be implemented immediately, tested side-by-side with the existing system and then migrated at CT Shirts’ convenience.

The result

As AgentCall is network-based, CT Shirts no longer needs lots of ISDN lines. Incoming calls are now placed on hold at the network level and callers now get the messages in their native language. Manageability of the contact center has improved dramatically as managers now have a real-time view of agent performance as well as accurate 3rd party stats on outsourcer performance. CT Shirts’ costs have reduced substantially due to much more efficient use of its existing resources.

Further developments

In 2015, Charles Tyrwhitt was being pressured by its merchant acquirer to become PCI DSS compliant for card payments by phone in its call centers. Based on its experience with Syntec’s services, Charles Tyrwhitt also decided to deploy the  CardEasy ‘keypad payment by phone’ DTMF system, which keeps the sensitive card information (PAN and CV2) out of the contact center entirely and thus de-scopes the contact center operation from PCI DSS regulations and audits.

We wanted to further enhance data security in our call center and decided to use Syntec’s secure phone keypad payment (DTMF), as it’s important to our customers that our payment solution is safe and easy to use.

CardEasy works just as effectively for callers in the USA, Germany and Australia as in the UK.

Simon Kerry, Chief Information Officer, Charles Tyrwhitt
  • "Syntec has helped us improve our call centre service levels and make cost efficiencies – a real win-win, backed up by very responsive levels of customer service."