Picnic delivers affordable and sustainable grocery shopping experiences with Salesforce.

 

Learn how Picnic tailors every step of the shopping experience with richer data, smarter processes, and personalised customer service.

Shopping for groceries can be a chore. But Dutch company, Picnic, really has thought of everything. Customers place their order via an app, receive a one-hour delivery slot in advance and 20 minute delivery window on the day, and fresh produce appears at the door.

And that’s not all. Picnic’s electric cars are specially designed to be tucked out the way, so they don’t block traffic. Drivers collect empty packaging for recycling. The baker even knows exactly how much bread to bake every day, so nothing goes to waste.

“At Picnic, we use data to give every stage of the shopping experience that magic touch so we can delight our customers,” said Lorena Salamanca, Tech Lead at Picnic. “With Salesforce, we used those insights to create frictionless and personal support services.”

 
 
With Salesforce, we’re delivering digital grocery shopping as it should be: person-centric, local, and sustainable.
Lorena Salamanca
Tech Lead
 
 
 

1. Affordable shopping with greater choice.

Founded in 2015 with just four cars, Picnic was the fastest growing company in the Netherlands by 2019. Today, its fleet of 1,000 cars deliver groceries to customers in 200 cities across the Netherlands, Germany, and France.

The digital supermarket provides end-to-end services from supply chain to finance, connecting local wholesalers with customers looking for a sustainable and affordable alternative to the high street experience.

“We want to keep growing our footprint while giving customers the same great experience they’ve come to expect,” revealed Salamanca. “That means fast service, relevant, localised offers, and a great selection of products.”

To transform customer service, the company needed to consolidate eight tools into one central platform. Not only were agents having to switch between multiple solutions, data silos meant they lacked comprehensive visibility of the customer.

And for the company that loves data, rolling out Service Cloud and connecting it to Tableau – the first third-party solution Picnic integrated into its landscape – provided the perfect opportunity to empower agents and tap into richer insights.

Previously, high numbers of data streams made it difficult to detect trends and patterns – let alone use data to make decisions.

“Tableau helps us get insights from our data quickly and easily,” explained Salamanca. “Collecting data is one thing, but where Tableau really shines is in how it translates complex data into visually appealing dashboards that help business users make better decisions”.

 
 
 

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2. Centralising service to support seamless customer experience.

The Picnic team worked with implementation partner, Vaneigens, to integrate Salesforce with its main customer service channels: phone, email, social media, and WhatsApp. It then took management of the platform in-house.

“We used Salesforce Accelerators to learn about specific topics such as governance and telephony integration, and we have a great relationship with our Salesforce Customer Success Manager if we need any additional support,” commented Salamanca.

With Service Cloud, agents can now handle all customer cases from a central console, whether they’re in the office or working remotely. Meanwhile, supervisors have complete visibility of how the team is performing, and the system captures KPIs such as how much active time it takes to resolve each case.

Richer data doesn’t just help the service team perform better, it also plays a vital role in identifying the root cause of issues so the team can put measures in place to prevent them recurring.

If a high volume of cases mention that strawberries arrived damaged, for example, the team can check how they’re being stored and transported to make sure they’re not being stacked under heavier items.

“Salesforce means we can track trends and feed them back to suppliers to optimise the whole supply chain,” added Salamanca. “We’re not just solving problems for our customers, we’re actively invested in making every step of the process as seamless as possible.”

 
 

8

8 tools consolidated into one
central platform for Service

 

20%

increase in productivity
for the service team

 

3. Transforming service with Real-time routing.

Picnic has also transformed the way cases are routed to agents. By integrating its custom AI solution with Service Cloud, the system can identify common topics and route cases to the most relevant agent.

For ongoing cases, customer replies are automatically sent to the agent they were engaging with previously to ensure a smooth, personalised service.

“One of the benefits of omni-channel routing is that we can get new agents onboarded and adding value faster,” explained Salamanca. “WhatsApp cases are usually more complex, so they go to experienced agents, but we can get someone handling simple cases with just a few hours of training.”

This means basic training now takes between one and five hours, compared to a week previously. And that’s not the only time saving. Up to 75% of cases received are routed to a specialist agent. Previously, it took 30 seconds for an agent to check and allocate cases manually, but with real-time omni-channel routing, Picnic saves 62.5 work-hours per week.

4. Taking a proactive approach to customer support.

With Salesforce, agents no longer need to switch between multiple systems and can focus on improving the customer experience. They can also proactively reach out to notify an individual if a delivery is going to be late for example – although with 97% of deliveries completed on time, this doesn’t happen often.

“Setting expectations is vital to keep customers happy. We enable automatic replies to acknowledge cases that come in out of hours or when we’re exceptionally busy so customers know we care about their issue and will respond as soon as we can,” added Salamanca.

This was particularly useful during the pandemic, when the volume of cases spiked dramatically.

5. Capturing feedback to meet customer needs.

Picnic is taking full advantage of the flexibility of the Salesforce platform. For example, they use Service Cloud workflows to find out which new items customers want to see stocked.

“Customers can suggest new products to add on the app. These are raised as cases in Service Cloud, which automatically strips the message down to just the item in question,” explained Salamanca. “Using ‘best match’ parameters, the solution links similar cases together and notifies us when there’s lots of demand for one particular product.”

Category managers can then use this insight to source those products from suppliers and all customers who requested the item receive automatic notifications that it’s in stock, which often leads to an increase in basket spend. As Salamanca added: “Who knows what customers want better than the customers themselves?”

Picnic also uses a customer-led approach when it launches a new feature, running AB testing in Salesforce. When the team designs new functionality, they test it on one group of users against a control group.

After measuring the success ratio in the test group, the team iterates until they’re happy with the success ratio and can roll out the change to all customers.

6. Simplifying operations.

The team responsible for managing stock, offers, categories, pricing, and promotions is known as the PIM – or product information – team. Their role relies on working closely with multiple stakeholders and partners involved in the supply chain to ensure customers have a good range of products to choose from.

Picnic is divided into three localised organisations each responsible for one region, and with this complex operating model, the PIM team uses Salesforce Platform to keep the business running smoothly.

“Before having our PIM solution integrated with Salesforce Platform we used spreadsheets to capture operational and product data for analysts. It was inefficient and when we wanted to add a new region, we realised it wasn’t a scalable way of working,” commented Salamanca.

Now, Picnic can easily add new territories and keep data isolated in line with compliance regulations. This means the organisation can preserve its best practice processes and great customer experience, while keeping data secure and empowering the PIM team to localise offers and work seamlessly with partners in their region.

“Salesforce is our single source of truth. Every region has their own commercial team and business analysts so we can use Tableau data in the smartest possible way,” confirmed Salamanca.

Picnic’s data warehouse connects datapoints across every backend system and service, along with Salesforce data for visualisation in Tableau. PIM analysts can then track and categorise issues, monitor the response when a new product is launched, and find out how much impact a promotion is having on average customer spend.

 
We’re not just solving problems for our customers, we’re actively invested in making every step of the process as seamless as possible.
Lorena Salamanca
Tech Lead
 
 

7. Putting the customer first.

Since implementing Salesforce, Picnic has seen customer satisfaction rise thanks to a 20% productivity increase on the service team, putting it on track to achieve its ambition of being one of the top companies for customer service in the sector.

As the company grows, giving more customers access to sustainable, affordable groceries, it’s not just good news for Picnic. It's also helping more local businesses to expand their offering in the community.

“Salesforce means we can get closer to customers at scale, while still tailoring the experience for local markets,” concluded Salamanca. “When good data meets great technology, anything is possible.”

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