Overview

Home to iconic brands including ALDO, Call It Spring, ROXY, Brooks Brothers, Ted Baker, and Hunter, The ALDO Group designs, sources, and distributes footwear, handbags, and fashion accessories across more than 100 countries. Operating out of Montreal, the company manages a global omnichannel contact center that handles customer inquiries, orders, and support across voice, chat, email, and store-support channels — serving a highly seasonal, fast-moving retail base at scale.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

The ALDO Group’s contact center ran on fragmented legacy platforms across telephony, IVR, digital channels, and chatbots — creating an uneven, high-effort experience for both customers and agents. Managers planned for five hours of weekly agent downtime just to cope with system limitations, and 60% of customers described the support process as difficult. Imbalanced staffing, limited real-time visibility, and costly manual processes drove rising attrition and made it nearly impossible to scale during peak retail seasons.

The Solution

The ALDO Group identified the root cause as platform fragmentation — disconnected systems that prevented agents from seeing a unified customer journey and prevented managers from making real-time staffing decisions based on accurate data. They selected the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform to consolidate voice, chat, and email onto a single omnichannel system, pairing it with Five9 Workforce Engagement Management (WEM), AI-assisted forecasting, and Genius AI to automate workflows and surface real-time insights. Victor Hernandez Saldana led the operating model redesign — building an annual-to-intraday planning rhythm and adoption framework that ensured the technology delivered lasting results, not just a go-live.

The results

Before: Agents averaged five hours of weekly downtime due to system instability, 60% of customers rated the support process as difficult, and rising attrition signaled a workforce under sustained pressure. Fragmented platforms meant customers repeated themselves across channels and agents lacked the context to resolve issues efficiently. After: The ALDO Group’s contact center is now described by customers as “frictionless.” Weekly system downtime dropped from five hours to under 20 minutes. Customer Effort Score climbed from 60% to 80%, agent attrition fell by 20%, and contact center systems costs were cut by 40% — savings reinvested into further innovation. The transformation set a new standard for AI-powered retail CX: unified, predictive, and built to scale across 100+ countries.

Metrics

80% Customer Effort Score (CES) achieved — up from 60% 24% improvement in Average Speed of Answer (ASA) 12.71% year-over-year reduction in call abandonment rate 20% reduction in agent attrition 40% reduction in contact center systems costs Weekly agent downtime reduced from ~5 hours to under 20 minutes Consistent 88% QA score following relaunch of Quality Assurance program ≈35% improvement in response times across channels

The Technology

Five9 Intelligent CX Platform (ACD, IVR, Omnichannel Routing) Five9 Genius AI & Five9 GenAI Studio Five9 AI Agent Assist Five9 Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) — AI-assisted forecasting, scheduling, and QM Five9 Workflow Automation Five9 Global Voice, Five9 Chat, Five9 Email

Disruptive Factor

The ALDO Group’s transformation challenged a deeply entrenched legacy architecture and the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset that comes with multi-brand, multi-country operations — overcoming internal resistance by treating adoption as a product, not an afterthought, with every release bundled with routing rules, QA rubrics, and supervisor playbooks. What makes this game-changing is the operating model Victor built around the technology: a continuous plan → run → learn → improve rhythm that turned a one-time go-live into a self-improving CX engine. The combination of AI-powered forecasting, real-time agent guidance, and closed-loop QA/knowledge management is rare in retail at this scale — and the 40% cost reduction alongside improved CX scores proves that efficiency and experience are not a trade-off. For a global fashion retailer operating across 100+ countries with extreme seasonal demand swings, this level of operational predictability sets a new benchmark for the industry.

Shining Moment

The proudest moment for this team came not from a dashboard, but from the agents themselves. After years of working around unreliable systems, coping with five-hour weekly outages, and absorbing customer frustration they couldn’t resolve — agents finally had tools that worked with them, not against them. Self-scheduling gave them back a measure of control over their workday. AI-assisted summaries eliminated the drudgery of post-call documentation. Coaching loops made improvement feel fair and transparent. The 20% drop in attrition isn’t just a cost metric — it’s evidence that when you fix the customer experience, you fix the agent experience too. Victor’s work proved that a workforce management transformation, done right, is also a people transformation.