The Warehouse Group

Salesforce has the tools we need to optimise the customer experience and accelerate our push into digital which is why we selected it to be our primary platform for customer success.”

Michelle Anderson | Chief Digital Officer, The Warehouse Group
 

85

email automations have been delivered

 

The Warehouse Group transforms for a sustainable and digital future

The Warehouse Group is New Zealand’s largest retail group and encompasses market-leading brands like The Warehouse, Warehouse Stationery, Noel Leeming, 1-day.co.nz and Torpedo7. These brands provide New Zealanders with everything from essential homewares and apparel through to premium consumer electronics, appliances and outdoor adventure gear. The brands also offer customers new digital experiences enabled by The Warehouse Group’s two-year transformation journey.

Michelle Anderson, Chief Digital Officer of The Warehouse Group, shared that their journey is aimed at delivering sustainable profitability and thereby continuing to create value for New Zealanders. “The Warehouse Group’s purpose is helping Kiwis live better every day and we’re fixing our retail fundamentals and investing in our digital future to deliver on this," said Anderson.

Salesforce is helping contribute to the transformation by helping The Warehouse Group to simplify processes and create new capabilities to improve the customer experience.

Salesforce provides single platform for customer success

The Warehouse Group’s transformation has been necessitated by a decline in earnings, emerging competitive threats and changing customer expectations. In addition, the business’ operations were siloed and complex. It had three separate call centre teams and five different systems just to manage customer engagement; and there were similar silos in marketing. The Warehouse Group wanted to reduce duplication of effort and costs, and better leverage its scale to serve customers. This led to consolidating its customer engagement activities around Salesforce.

“Salesforce has the tools we need to optimise the customer experience and accelerate our push into digital which is why we selected it to be our primary platform for customer success,” said Anderson.

One of The Warehouse Group’s first transformation initiatives has centred on the use of Service Cloud to integrate call centre teams and enable team members to support customers across all brands. When complete, this integration will give the business the flexibility to allocate call centre resources to whichever brand needs them the most. This will improve the productivity of team members while reducing customer waiting times.

In tandem with this integration, The Warehouse Group is leveraging Service Cloud to allow customers to access support across whatever channel they choose. Both Live Agent and social media messages are accessed by agents via the Service Cloud Console which allows them to manage multiple conversations at once. It also gives them instant access to customer information which they can use to deliver faster, more personalised support.

“With Salesforce, we’ve been able to move away from a traditional, phone-based support model towards enabling our customers to interact with us whenever and however they choose. It’s also helped to increase the efficiency of our digital support channels,” said Anderson.

The Warehouse Group is now working on an Einstein powered chatbot which would be used to provide customers with immediate answers to frequently asked questions, like “Where is my order?”. These inquiries are currently responsible for 20 - 30% of call centre volumes so the potential time savings are huge and will allow agents to serve other customers faster, providing personalised service where it’s needed.

Driving radical change in culture and communications

The shift towards digital is taking place within marketing at The Warehouse Group as well, and to facilitate this, marketing for all brands has been brought under one umbrella. There are still dedicated teams for each brand, but they are working together to redefine customer engagement. The past year has been all about the fundamentals and using Marketing Cloud to build and automate customer lifecycle communications.

Marketing has so far delivered a total of 85 automations across its brands, including welcome journeys, post-purchase journeys and loyalty communications. Using Marketing Cloud, communications are built and pushed out in a streamlined way. Conversion rates are in the double digits.

“In the past, every email was bespoke and handmade, whereas now we’re able to templatise, learn from what is and isn’t working, and using Salesforce to test into the most right communications,” said Jonathan Waecker, Chief Marketing Officer of The Warehouse Group. “It’s uncomfortable and a huge cultural change, but it’s helping us get closer to customers and deliver on our digital future.”

Increasing personalisation

The Warehouse Group’s next phase of transformation includes improving the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising through the use of Commerce Cloud. The Warehouse and Warehouse Stationery brands are already using Commerce Cloud to provide a seamless online experience and increase sales leveraging Einstein Predictive Sort. Einstein Predictive Sort uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and customer data to deliver more tailored product results, decreasing the time a customer spends looking for what they want and increasing conversion. The business hopes to replicate this success as it rolls out Commerce Cloud to the rest of its brands.

The other exciting initiative planned is the use of Audience Studio to unify and activate customer data. The Warehouse Group wants to better understand who its customers are and how they are interacting with its brands online and in-store. This data will be used to personalise marketing and also feed into Einstein Product Recommendations.

“By unlocking our data and the full capabilities of Salesforce we will be able to deliver personalised experiences to our customers wherever they turn up and that goes right back to our purpose of helping Kiwis live better,” said Anderson.

 
 

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