Currys’ omnichannel experience wows customers with Salesforce

When Dr Bashir stepped into her kitchen on her day off, two terrible things happened. She stood in a puddle of cold water in her socks and realised her fridge had broken overnight. Remembering the great ShopLive video chat she had with Akira at Currys when she bought her laptop, she heads over to her local branch.

On arrival, she’s greeted by Steve who listens carefully to her requirements and brings up a list of options using StoreMode, a bespoke app for sales reps, on his tablet. Together, they look at the models in store, making sure the new fridge will fit easily into the space left by the old one.

In a few minutes, she’s ready to buy, but what about delivery? Dr Bashir can't fit the fridge in her car, so Steve checks her details on his tablet and arranges next day, home delivery and collection of her old appliance for recycling. On the day, a team from Currys arrive to install the new fridge and take her old one away.

With colleagues like Steve working hard to give customers their all, it’s easy to see how Currys has become the UK’s leading technology retailer – more than 80% of UK households have shopped with the retailer in the last three years.

“Customers find technology exciting, but they can also find it confusing and expensive. They need help to choose the right tech, to afford it, and then to enjoy it to the full. In the UK, we have 11,000 capable and committed store colleagues ready to give expert face-to-face advice, and Salesforce is helping us to build customers for life,” explained Alex Baldock, Group Chief Executive Officer at Currys.

Currys was founded as a bicycle shop in 1884. Since then, it’s become a market-leading technology retailer with a strong online business and over 300+ stores across the UK and Ireland. In fact, it was named sixth busiest retail website in 2021 by Retail Week.

The company believes that purpose and profit go hand in hand. To give customers lifetime value from their purchases, it’s expanding its services across credit, insurance, trade-in, repairs, refuse and recycling. In fact, sustainability and giving tech a longer life is one of Currys’ key service initiatives and their Newark campus is home to the largest repair centre in Europe. Last year the operation fixed 850,000 products from across the Currys group.

From helping customers to make greener choices to attracting ethical-minded investors, sustainability is no longer a nice to have, but the key to building brand loyalty and growing market share.

“Customer expectations have changed rapidly over the last few years. They have a different set of needs and priorities,” said Paul Olley, General Manager at Currys, Ashford. “When it comes to shopping, people expect the same great experience in-store and online. They want to shop when and where it suits them, and they want impartial, expert advice from people who represent their local communities.”

And expectations only got higher during the pandemic, with customers favouring retailers and operators in non-competing sectors offering a fast, simple ecommerce experience. Today’s consumer is less tolerant of any friction in their shopping experience.

Data reveals up to 80% of Currys’ customers start their journey online, making the website the perfect place to kick off its omnichannel transformation. While 60% of Currys customers prefer to shop across multiple channels, its omnichannel shoppers are 27% more likely to shop again compared to those who use one channel.

The vision for Currys’ digital transformation was simple: give customers an unrivalled omnichannel experience, augmented by technology, but enabled by people.

Simplicity is key when it comes to creating a smooth customer experience, but Currys had more than 500 applications and complex digital journeys across multiple websites and brands. This wasn’t just a source of potential confusion for customers, it was also challenging to maintain, especially during peak periods such as major product launches/releases, when the volume of traffic and transactions soared.

But with Salesforce, the difference according to Chief Information Officer, Andy Gamble, is ‘like night and day’.

“Salesforce shares our values of putting people first and winning together,” he revealed. “We worked with Professional Services and our preferred systems integrator to relaunch our website on Commerce Cloud and enhance the in-store experience.”

Salesforce Professional Services worked alongside Currys from day one, providing trusted advice and guidance to accelerate the implementation, and ensuring scalability by applying a best practice approach. With a thorough understanding of the retailer’s environment and goals, Salesforce experts worked across Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and MuleSoft technologies to help the team to overcome challenges and build a truly scalable solution in record time.

Keeping the customer front of mind, the team designed one digital experience and aligned multiple backend systems under a Commerce Cloud shop front. But when you’ve been in business for nearly 140 years, finding the right balance between legacy technology and new investments can be challenging.

“We didn’t want to transform everything, but rather think about the role legacy systems played in our new environment. Customers won’t thank us for having a great financial reconciliation platform, but they’d notice if it stopped working!” said Arron D’Aubney, Chief Technology Officer at Currys. “MuleSoft was a game changer. It accelerated our transformation by stitching together backend systems seamlessly.”

In less than 12 months, the new website went live on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and the ecommerce team said goodbye to performance issues, limited scalability, and sleepless nights during peak seasons. In fact, after redesigning the look and feel of the website, Currys had its most successful peak period ever, handling millions of interactions and hundreds of thousands of orders without a hitch.

With more time to focus on creativity, the team enhanced content to promote services such as its Care & Repair plans and installation services, optimised the website for desktop and mobile, and rolled out Einstein Artificial Intelligence, making it easier to search for products and giving returning customers a more personalised experience.

Commerce Cloud has given Currys a strong personalisation engine. Customers can see content and offers based on their behaviour or the data that Currys already holds. For example, if a customer has already shown an interest in eco-friendly products, the site can surface content about Currys’ green credentials and provide offers tailored around recycling. Tests on homepage personalisation to date have shown higher engagement, higher conversion, and increased basket spend. The addition of Commerce Cloud also makes it easier for Currys to run tests like this at scale.

“With Salesforce, we can surface a huge range of products and still make it easy for customers to find everything they need. Expert advice is only a click away, but if customers don’t want to speak to an agent, Einstein can guide them towards more related items without disrupting the browsing experience,” said Gillian Geraghty, eCommerce and Omnichannel Director, Currys.

Einstein Product Recommendations also shows customers relevant items that complement their purchase at the checkout, and popular products that other customers viewed.

By helping people find the right product at the right time and increasing up- and cross-sell opportunities, the company has seen both conversion rates and average order value (AOV) increase. With 8.5 million shoppers - online and in store - per week, that’s no mean feat, and the team is excited to start running personalised offers and promotions on the platform in the future.

“Commerce Cloud gives us the agility to react quickly and release new functionality every two weeks,” said Natalie Barnett, Head of Online Trading at Currys. “We used to start load testing for peak periods six months in advance. Now, we don’t need to do anything – Salesforce scales seamlessly, so we can spend more time bringing our visions of an incredible shopping experience to life.”

The next piece of the omnichannel puzzle was creating a consistent shopping experience from anywhere. That meant equipping customer-facing sales colleagues with 360-degree visibility of the customer from the moment they step into a store.

Currys’ Colleague Hub, built on Service Cloud Lightning and run on the Salesforce App, will give the sales team everything they need to know to delight a customer from their tablet. This includes the online customer history, a log of all their interactions, and any items they’ve put in their online shopping cart, all displayed in real time.

It also acts as a one-stop-shop for colleagues with fast access to knowledge articles, and tasks. It’s integrated with other Currys internal systems and data from the website to help the team access key everyday apps and get a single view of the customer.

“Shopping for electricals can be exciting or emotional. The last thing we want is to start telling a customer about the latest games console if they’re stressed because their washing machine has packed up,” explained Steve Head, Sales Advisor at Currys Ashford. “With real-time insights by asking genuine questions and listening to their needs, we know how to support each and every customer and can have more authentic interactions.”

For customers who can’t pop into their local branch but still want to speak to a real person, Currys launched a service called ShopLive in 2020. This 24/7 video chat offers the in-store experience online, making expert advice more accessible to around 34,000 callers a week. On the calls customers speak to a store-based colleague wearing a headset who can walk around the showroom, give the customer a live demo of any product, and even place the order for them during the session.

From the customers’ point of view, they get the help they need come up via a video conferencing, which became increasingly familiar to many during the pandemic. Ninety-four per cent of customers are highly satisfied with the service. From Currys’ point of view, the business, sells more - conversion is four times higher and the average order value is 40% higher than unassisted online. Customers are also more likely to protect their tech with add-on services.

Live video assistance isn’t the only trick Currys has up its sleeve when it comes to delighting the customer, it’s also using an app called StoreMode. The app is accessed through Colleague Hub, combining a single view of the customer with collaboration tools, and the full product catalogue and payment function of Commerce Cloud.

Rather than specialising in one area, sales reps can now take training modules on their tablet and become an expert in anything. If they need help answering a customer query, they can tap into a wider pool of knowledge using an internal social media platform and get an answer in minutes.

“StoreMode facilitates more guided selling. We can use filters as we’re talking to customers to find the most appropriate product for their needs and lifestyle and complete the transaction there and then. If they need help spreading the cost, we can offer financial services such as credit or insurance,” explained Head. “We can also take them through the sustainability credentials of a product to help identify which are best for the planet and their pocket.”

The app also gives colleagues the power to order items for next day delivery to the store – giving customers more options on top of home delivery, click and collect, and contactless collection.

Paul Olley reported he ‘couldn’t imagine life without StoreMode’. StoreMode empowers our colleagues in stores and helps them to build more memorable and deeper relationships with customers and strengthens their reputation as trusted advisors

As it moves into the next phase of its transformation, Currys is well on the way to cementing its position as the UK’s choice for all things tech. Its Net Promoter Score has increased by 20 points, and the volume of online customers doubled in the past two years, with two-thirds of customers now shopping across both channels. 

And the team is unanimously excited for the future. Store colleagues can’t wait to get their hands on StoreMode, the omnichannel team are letting their imaginations run wild, and the contact centre and marketing teams are next in line to take customer-centricity to the next level.

“With Salesforce, we have all the tools in our armoury to support and delight customers at scale. Customers trust us, and we trust Salesforce – our relationships are built around winning together, and that’s why we’ll succeed in the future,” concluded Barnett.