Overview

Founded in 1986 in Kenora, Ontario, The Dufresne Group (TDG) has grown into one of Canada’s leading home furnishings retailers, operating across the country through its Dufresne and Ashley brands and across multiple U.S. states through its partnership with Dufresne Spencer Group. With between 500 and 2,000 employees and a mission centered on making life better for its teams, guests, and communities, TDG delivers a personalized, relationship-driven retail experience at scale. Its contact center is the frontline of that guest promise — handling inquiries, appointments, order status, and escalations across a growing North American footprint.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

As TDG expanded across Canada and the U.S., its aging contact center technology fell further behind — basic tasks required engineering support, manual workflows slowed agents, post-call documentation consumed valuable time, and rigid systems made it impossible to deliver the connected, consistent guest experience the brand stood for. Then everything stopped: a complete telephony outage left TDG unable to answer calls or support guests at all, putting hard-won guest relationships, revenue, and trust at immediate risk. What had been a planned 12-to-24-month platform replacement became an urgent 30-day emergency — with zero room for error.

The Solution

TDG identified that the root issues were fragmentation, manual overhead, and a lack of AI-powered automation — and that restoring service alone wasn’t enough; the replacement had to be better in every dimension. They selected Five9 for its ability to unify all guest touchpoints (voice, email, chat) into a single omnichannel platform, integrate with TDG’s STORIS ERP system, and deploy Agentic AI — including an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA), AI Agent Assist, AI Transcription, AI Summaries, and Workflow Automation — within the aggressive 30-day window. The result was not just a recovery but a transformation: Five9 and TDG designed and launched a fully automated, AI-powered contact center in less than a month.

The results

Before: TDG’s contact center ran on a fragile legacy platform with 50% agent utilization, 30 seconds of after-call work per interaction, a 20% call abandonment rate, and a customer satisfaction score of 60%. A three-person escalation team was required just to manage overflow. Then the system failed entirely. After: In 30 days, TDG went from no contact center to a world-class one. Customer satisfaction jumped from 60% to 95%. Call abandonment dropped from 20% to under 10%. Guest wait times were cut by 66%. Average handle time fell 25%. Agent utilization climbed from 50% to 80%. After-call work dropped to zero. Call deflection went from 0% to 70% via the IVA — and the three-person escalation team is no longer needed. As Ahmad Jad, Guest Care Manager, put it: “We have cut our spending to less than half of what it was before Five9. For a contact center, the record-low costs we’re operating at are almost unheard of.”

Metrics

Customer satisfaction score: 95% — up from 60% Call abandonment rate: under 10% — down from 20% Guest wait time: reduced by 66% Average handle time: reduced by 25% Agent utilization: 80% — up from 50% After-call work: reduced to zero (from 30 seconds per interaction) Call deflection rate: 70% — up from 0% via Five9 IVA Contact center costs: cut to less than half of pre-Five9 levels Escalation team eliminated: intelligent routing replaced a 3-person team Full platform deployed in 30 days

The Technology

Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) — agentic AI for self-service and call deflection Five9 AI Agent Assist — real-time context, next-best action, and guided conversations Five9 AI Transcription — automated call documentation Five9 AI Summaries — post-call summaries fed directly into STORIS ERP Five9 Workflow Automation — real-time keyword flagging and supervisor alerts Five9 Voice, Email, Chat — unified omnichannel guest engagement STORIS ERP integration — 360-degree guest interaction view

Disruptive Factor

TDG didn’t just modernize under pressure — they executed a complete contact center replacement in 30 days while the business was effectively dark, a timeline that the industry would typically consider impossible for an omnichannel, AI-integrated deployment. The disruptive achievement is the combination of speed and depth: in the same month TDG restored service, they also deployed Agentic AI, integrated with their ERP, eliminated their escalation team, and took call deflection from zero to 70% — outcomes most organizations take years to reach. This transformation challenges the assumption that stability and innovation are sequential — TDG proved that a crisis can be the catalyst for a leap forward rather than just a recovery. For Canadian and North American retail, TDG has set a new benchmark: a guest experience operation that is faster, smarter, cheaper, and more human than what existed before the outage.

Shining Moment

The moment the team is most proud of is the 24/7 self-service capability TDG’s guests now have — the ability to book appointments and check order status at any hour, without waiting on hold, from anywhere. For a home furnishings retailer where purchases are meaningful, often emotional decisions, being available around the clock with the same care a live agent would provide is a genuine brand differentiator. As Norman J. Alegria, Director of Guest Care, put it: “Self-service hasn’t replaced the human touch — it’s enhanced it. It allows us to meet guests where they are, anytime, with the same care they’d receive from a live agent.” That philosophy — technology in service of the human relationship, not instead of it — is the heart of what TDG built with Five9.