Shop Direct Group (SDG), the UK’s leading online and home shopping retailer, has worked with Merseyside-based CDMS to produce searchable digital catalogues for its contact centres.

With one in three households in the UK owning one or more of SDG’s catalogues, the call centre staff need to have numerous copies of the catalogues across all the company’s brands when answering queries and taking orders.

CDMS worked with SDG’s marketing and publishing team to put together the catalogues for publication throughout the year.

Once the catalogue is signed off to be printed in hard copy, the digital file is produced by CDMS to become the virtual book. 

Programming the file to allow photographs to be magnified, pages to be flickable and text searchable is all carried out by the team at CDMS.

The virtual books include a simple navigation, bookmarks and the ability to search for products based on brand, product name, catalogue code or page numbers leading to faster call handling times

Notes can be added to pages within the Virtual Book to allow for information useful to the advisor to be displayed alongside the product.

The zoom facility on the images means that advisors can better describe the image to customers from their digital copy.  Advisors can display detailed product knowledge such as what a motif says on a t-shirt, whether a top has diamante, what the neckline is like, whether the dress is trimmed with lace.