Every year, 1-800-Flowers facilitates millions of flower deliveries, bringing in more than $1 billion in revenue. Not surprisingly, the holidays -- Mother's Day in particular -- are crucial for the brand.
With thousands of customer service calls coming in daily during the Mother's Day season, 1-800-Flowers was looking for a way to save the company -- and customers -- time and money. This year, it's doing so with the help of IBM Cloud.
Before this year, 30 percent of 1-800-Flowers customer service calls came from customers who wanted to modify an order -- they may have, for example, submitted the wrong address, or they may have wanted to change the message being sent with their flowers. The 42-year-old company has had a web presence since the mid-1990's, but its complex backend systems made it too challenging to offer these services online.
This was largely because the company's systems span multiple brands, according to 1-800-Flowers CIO Arnie Leap. When it acquired the Harry & David brand four years ago -- accounting for about 40 percent of the company's revenue -- it took on a completely different set of infrastructure systems and business processes.
"The challenge is depending on the brand, it's different customer service systems, different sales entry systems -- most of which are homegrown legacy systems, very brittle and resistant to change," he told ZDNet. "It would force us into long cycles of development... Over time, systems of that type develop a large amount of tribal knowledge about how things work and why they work the way they do."
Still, with a mandate from the marketing department to offer more digital self-service options for customers, 1-800-Flowers approached IBM Cloud, which was already providing them with some cloud services. IBM suggested the company check out