The client
One of the largest furniture manufacturers in the world headquartered in Arcadia, Wisconsin, has its distribution centers in Washington, California, New Jersey, and Florida in the United States, with global operations in Canada, Mexico, Central America, Japan, and Singapore.
From the first Home Store in Alaska in 1997 the retail arm grew to become 800+ stores worldwide, and the brand, the #1 home furniture retailer in North America.
Challenge
Retail customers found it cumbersome to register complaints for defective products and follow up with the Customer Support Agents (CSA) via emails.
Phone contact centers often had long wait times, and needed follow-up emails.
Solution
The D4Insight team integrated a Twilio™ customer engagement platform with Salesforce to set up a SMS channel. Twilio was chosen, as it proved easy to integrate with Salesforce. The features of the implementation include:
- A custom module to send SMS with multiple attachments.
- Custom designed templates ( like email templates) in SMS format, to help agents with quick and easy responses.
Benefits
- It helps the customer to report a product defect with a corresponding picture immediately, without dialing in to a phone number and waiting to be attended.
- Customer data (phone number) automatically gets populated from the data already existing in the system reducing manual efforts.
- All SMS conversations with a customer are logged in the system of record.
- Customers have the flexibility to opt out if they prefer more traditional interfaces.
Any solution schema diagram.
Results
The retailer saw cost savings with call volumes to the voice contact center reducing by approximately 50%.
On-demand report function in Twilio can help to identify inbound and outbound SMS from a number and associated costs both cumulatively and discretely.
The retail customer experienced a tangible difference in customer service:
- Better support experience, as replies to an SMS is almost immediate.
- Customers can re-open any closed case by sending an SMS.
- Opt-in Opt-out option for the customer for receiving SMS provided.
Next steps
Solution can be enhanced to add on customers’ preferred channels like Whatsapp messaging and video if required.
