The new platform also empowered Halfords to respond to the tight restrictions on previously normal customer behaviour, imposed by lockdowns and the public’s desire to keep themselves and their families safe with contactless fulfilment options.
“Providing convenience and control for customers was vital,” said Ford. “For click and collect we introduced a collection slot system, giving customers a precise collection time, minimising their time in store, and helping them to feel safe.”
Recently, Halfords needed to create a web form which would capture customer information for those requiring a service but were not able to find a reservation in their preferred store. Halfords knew that extra capacity would become available and wanted to get back to customers as soon as possible. Over the course of 48 hours, this concept became a fully deployed solution leveraging Service Cloud and Community Cloud➚. Now, once the form is submitted by a customer, a case is created which is then progressed by an agent.
The Government’s £50 ‘fix your bike’ scheme was also a major challenge, creating huge demand– there were 3.3 million views for the free bike health check scheme alone in the year to March 2021 – and fresh challenges that the company needed to handle overnight to integrate and control all the various aspects. It was tough but a combination of the platform’s agile nature, the increased visibility into user data, and the flexibility and great collaboration between its IT and store teams made it happen. It also provided fantastic data about lots of new customers.
“I think customers recognised our efforts to make it work under difficult circumstances, certainly our Net Promoter Score reflected that,” said Ford.
“We think about the customer’s journey from end-to-end and, armed with the data from the platform, we can see what that means for all of our colleagues and where the opportunities are for them to ‘sprinkle the magic’ as we say, to make that experience personal and memorable.
“Thanks to Salesforce we can curate those journeys, around specific products. If a customer selects a particular bike, we can suggest the right helmet, clothing, or lock appropriate for that bike. These are only options to buy, but customers trust our recommendations and by making it easy to add additional items, our average order value has increased.”
Commerce Cloud is also integrated with the existing Service Cloud solution, providing a seamless experience and single place for customers to shop, and also receive the support they need through features such as Live Chat to offload overall case volume and freeing up service agents to focus on more complex enquiries. Thanks to Salesforce, agents can also view the history of each caller, meaning they can provide advice tailored to the customer.
“Salesforce was also very proactive in assessing the situation and proposing new ways of handling the pressure,” added Ford. “Live Chat is a great example of that, we worked closely with Salesforce to accelerate and automate processes using bots, to serve customers and provide a breathing space for contact centre colleagues to handle complex calls.”
Another highlight has been Salesforce Business Manager, the Commerce Cloud online tool for configuring and managing business to consumer commerce storefronts. In such a fast-moving situation messaging was constantly changing every day and needed to stay relevant and consistent across all of Halfords’ channels, to reflect what was going on in the outside world.
“Business Manager is so simple to use and empowering for our teams, who were under constant pressure, enabling them to stay in control of the experience for the customer,” explained Ford.
Halfords has also leveraged Salesforce Community Cloud internally as part of its Cycle2Work scheme.
