Case Study: Halfords achieves record‑breaking profits and seamless customer experience with 8x8

Prominent retailer puts customer experience first, leading to record-breaking profits

Halfords, the UK’s leading motoring and cycling retailer with hundreds of stores, garages and mobile vans, faced a surge in customer contacts during the pandemic that exposed limits in its on‑premises telephony. Legacy systems couldn’t transfer calls between locations, track metrics effectively, or scale quickly, creating counter queues, manual callbacks and a fragmented customer experience. The company needed a cloud‑based, future‑proof platform and a single published number that let callers self-select the right department.

Halfords implemented 8x8’s cloud communications and contact‑centre platform—integrating unified communications for 4,852 staff, porting 4,000+ extensions and deploying to 736 sites in six weeks—plus Salesforce and other third‑party integrations and Premium support. Colleagues gained voice, chat, email, SMS and analytics tools; customers reach the business via one number with instant context, live web chat and call‑back features reduced queues and lost calls, CSAT and NPS improved, and the retailer is on track for record‑breaking profits.

Halfords

Gareth Brophy

Head of Customer Support