85%

customer satisfaction rating

 
 

The Skin Nerd Network helps people feel empowered and enlightened in education of their own skin and Salesforce helps support them on that journey

In order to feel the best version of yourself, healthy skin is key. While skincare has advanced in leaps and bounds, navigating the latest products to find your perfect match can be difficult.

That’s where The Skin Nerd comes in. Founded in 2017, the team of dedicated ‘Nerds and Nerdettes’ offers customers virtual consultations to understand their skin, their challenges, and empower customers with education to make the best decisions on what is right for their skin.

“We were one of the first companies to offer virtual consultations only and at the time everyone thought we were crazy, but when the pandemic hit, we were ahead of the game,” said Paul Gillart, Managing Director at The Skin Nerd. “Today, we’ve carried out more than 50,000 virtual consultations and perform 1,000 consultations per month, and expect to grow another 40% this year.”

So, how does a team of 23 delight a growing volume of customers with a highly personalised experience? With a little help from Salesforce.

 

Connecting the customer experience

The Skin Nerd was launched by award-winning dermal facialist, Jennifer Rock, who wanted to put the ‘care’ back into ‘skincare’ and empower customers with the education to make the best decisions for their skin.

Its three digital business units include the Cleanse Off Mitt, a revolutionary product designed to cleanse and remove makeup naturally, Skingredients®, the company’s skincare range, and The Skin Nerd Network – a membership programme that includes a virtual consultation, ongoing support, and access to exclusive content.

From the start, the company needed to implement a business strategy that would centralise and connect customer data and empower the service team and skin experts with 360-degree visibility. In just two months the initial set up was created and it has continued to build on it ever since.

“When we decided to get a CRM solution it had to be Salesforce. I wanted to build our business on the best, and Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM,” said Gillart.

The Skin Nerd worked with a partner for the initial implementation and turned to Premier Success, a dedicated resource providing expert guidance on Salesforce, to help Business Analyst, Shrikant Samarth, learn how to adapt and maintain the platform in-house.

“Our Salesforce Success Manager was like a mentor to me. She guided me through customisations, setting permissions, and onboarding the Skingredients® business to our Salesforce platform,” he recalled.

A single source of truth for support

Today, when a customer visits The Skin Nerd website, they can browse articles, purchase products, or book a skincare consultation using a self-serve booking app. If they have any queries while they browse, they can use Live Chat from Service Cloud that Samarth configured to fit the company’s specific customer needs.

Both customer support agents and skincare experts use Salesforce as their single source of truth. Salesforce is integrated with the ecommerce platform to provide visibility of orders, and when customer support cases come in, they’re automatically categorised by topic and routed to the right agent.

A key part of Skin Nerd’s strategy is delivering an omni-channel and personalised experience for its customers. Service Cloud is also integrated with a telephony solution to automate dialling and give the team insight into who’s calling before they even connect with the customer.

Customers can also reach the team via live chat, email, and WhatsApp. Service Cloud brings all these channels into a central console, making it easy for agents and skincare experts to give customers the same high level of service across all channels with all the information they need in one place.

“Salesforce is my platform of choice. It makes it super easy to have great and relevant conversations with customers,” said Daphné Bwetol Nkiani, Customer Experience Coordinator, The Skin Nerd. “If someone sends multiple tickets for the same issue we can merge them into one, and we’ve got the full customer history available in just a few clicks.”

Personalised skincare advice from an expert

Before a skincare consultation, customers are asked to fill in a comprehensive form and upload photos. All this information is captured in Salesforce for the experts to analyse before the video conference, so they can devote the full 30 minutes to talking to the customer. And, because customers can complete the consultation from the comfort of their own home, healthy skin is more accessible for everyone.

“We’re very selective when we hire our skincare experts. Our customers range from young teenagers through to people in their 70s, all with very different skincare needs,” added Gillart. “Salesforce means we can give a seamless service to everyone; and the success is eminent - 73% of customers go on to buy products from us following a consultation.”

And, the small team is genuinely dedicated to getting the best outcomes for customers, following up 12 weeks later to find out how they’re getting on with their regime and whether they need to make any adjustments.

It’s no surprise, then, that as well as building legions of loyal fans, The Skin Nerd scores an impressive 85% for customer satisfaction.

Getting smarter with actionable data

While Service Cloud takes care of the customer experience, the company also uses Tableau to get richer insights from company data to continue to develop new products and services.

The solution connects live data from multiple touchpoints and systems, including Tableau CRM, ecommerce, order data, and intel from social media. This can then be visualised in user-friendly dashboards and analysed according to use case.

Before Tableau the company relied on a traditional spreadsheet, but the volume of data became too much. Tableau streamlined access to the data and now allows for deeper understanding of the customer needs.

“Tableau helped us identify which skin complaints were trending so we could develop new products to address those needs,” explained Gillart. “We also track open tickets and customer service peaks to make sure we can always meet demand.”

Next, the company is planning to explore how it can use Artificial Intelligence to answer basic queries with a chat bot to free up the team to focus on more complex cases.

“As a company, we’re always asking what we can do better. With Salesforce, we know we can bring new ideas to life quickly to help more people feel happy and confident in their own skin,” concluded Gillart.

Discover more about why Salesforce is the world’s best CRM for small business.

 

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