Cardinal & Rowe
Cardinal & Rowe lifted CSAT 9 points and onboarded 300 seasonal agents to full proficiency 40% faster
Omnichannel retailer Cardinal & Rowe triples its support team every holiday season, and quality historically collapsed with the surge. Using Homayar's coaching and scoring across every call, the company brought seasonal agents to proficiency 40% faster, lifted CSAT 9 points year over year, and turned peak season from a quality risk into its strongest quarter.
Results
- +9 pts
- CSAT (peak season, year over year)
- 6 weeks → 3.5 weeks
- Seasonal agent time to proficiency
- -28% of December calls
- Contact volume removed via root-cause fixes
- +17 pts
- Refund-policy adherence
The starting point
The challenge
Cardinal & Rowe runs 95 stores and a large e-commerce operation, with a support center that grows from 150 to 450 agents between October and January. Seasonal agents historically took six weeks to reach proficiency — half the season — and supervisors managing 25 new agents each had no realistic way to know who was struggling until CSAT surveys and refund anomalies surfaced weeks later. Order-status, returns, and shipping-exception calls spiked together during peak, and the company's December CSAT routinely dropped 6 to 8 points below its annual average. Leadership had accepted the seasonal quality dip as a cost of doing business.
The deployment
The solution
Cardinal & Rowe deployed Homayar three months before peak season. The QA Scoring Agent evaluates every call from day one of each seasonal agent's tenure, so supervisors see exactly who needs help on which call type by the end of week one rather than week five. The Coaching Agent generates a daily development summary per agent — the two skills to work on next, each backed by real call moments — which team leads use in ten-minute daily huddles. The Issue Detection Agent separated controllable problems from upstream ones, showing that 28% of December contact volume traced to a single carrier's tracking-data delays; the e-commerce team added proactive shipping notifications and removed those calls entirely. The Insights Agent gave the VP of Customer Experience a live view of CSAT drivers throughout peak, replacing the post-season retrospective with same-week course corrections.
“Peak season used to be the quarter we apologized for. This year our seasonal hires were coaching-ready in their first week, our December CSAT beat our annual average for the first time, and we deleted a quarter of our call volume by fixing the actual root cause. The data was always in the calls — we just couldn't hear it before.”