Pets at Home makes customer care more efficient with Service Cloud
The rewards for getting customer service right can be substantial. More than 90% of consumers say a positive customer service experience encourages repeat purchases and builds trust. And trust is essential when it involves the wellbeing of a beloved pet. “For many people, pets are an extension of their family. And that means there can be a lot of emotion attached to customer interactions,” said Lisette Boyd, Director of Customer Services and Digital Operations for Pets at Home.
Balancing empathy with efficiency, however, can be a massive challenge for customer service leaders. But it’s a balance that Pets at Home achieves hundreds of times a day with the help of trailblazing technology. For example, the introduction of a customer care chatbot helped to reduce contact volumes by 50,000 in three months whilst also boosting consumer and agent satisfaction.
“We are constantly exploring new ways to deliver richer customer experiences and achieve better business outcomes,” said Boyd. “With Salesforce, we can empower our people to work more productively without losing any of the passion or personalisation that makes our customer services special.”
In this article, Boyd and some of the other Trailblazers at Pets at Home explain how they have increased the efficiency and quality of the company’s customer services with smarter automation, stronger integration, and richer insights.
Enriching customer interactions with digital technologies.
As the UK’s leading pet care business, Pets at Home provides owners with everything they need to look after their animal companions – from food and accessories to grooming services and veterinary advice. Since the first Pets at Home store opened in 1991, the business has gone from strength to strength. It now operates 450+ stores as well as hundreds of Groom Room salons and vet practices across the UK.
“Through our unique combination of products, services, and expertise, we make pet care more rewarding, convenient, and affordable for millions of owners,” said Boyd. “Salesforce enables us to build even stronger emotional connections with our customers and focus on becoming the best pet care company in the world.”
The 90-strong customer care team at Pets at Home has been using Service Cloud since May 2021 to help build and maintain these emotional connections. Every customer care interaction on every channel is captured in Service Cloud, which was implemented with support from Salesforce Professional Services, part of the Customer Success Group.
The Professional Services team helped Pets at Home establish a centralised case management platform for handling customer queries across all its business lines – from ecommerce orders and pet care services to VIP accounts and veterinary partners. Prior to deploying Service Cloud, the team used static spreadsheets to log interactions. “We couldn’t see customer responses on individual cases or track resolution times,” said Emily Dickinson, Crisis Escalation and Executive Resolution Leader for Pets at Home. “We needed to transform how we engaged with customers and managed cases.”
Salesforce’s technical architects helped make these transformations a reality by implementing automatic skills routing, enhancing Salesforce Live Chat, and establishing integrations with Tableau for data visualisation and the Rant and Rave Survey Tool for feedback collection. Deploying Salesforce has not only enriched the customer experience but also helped Pets at Home unlock the visibility it needs to match the right colleague skill set to the right consumer.
Boosting efficiency with automated workflows and chatbots
Automation and self-service are key to increasing the quality and efficiency of customer services. And Pets at Home wants to ensure it delivers on both fronts. “We want to make things easy for both our customers and our colleagues,” said Boyd. “With Service Cloud, we can free up our people to spend more time providing support to owners and their pets when they need it most.”
Pets at Home uses automated processes to streamline and accelerate its response to around 11% of customer contacts. For example, an AI-powered chatbot provides the initial response to all queries raised on its live chat channel and deals with nearly a third of all Where Is My Order contacts per week.
“We set a target to reduce our contacts by 75,000 in a year; we hit 50,000 in just over three months,” said Boyd. “We’ve also reduced the average handling time for live chats by 85 seconds.” With the customer care team responding to around 9,000 live chat contacts per week, this equates to a time saving of around 200 hours per week.
The channel, which is powered by Service Cloud’s Live Agent, has also been a big hit with customers thanks to its efficiency and simplicity. The company’s Trustpilot score rose from 2.7 to 4.2 within four months of the live chat launch. Agent satisfaction ratings also increased from 4 to 4.2. “With live chat, we can provide customers with a richer experience. It also presents us with more up-selling and cross-selling opportunities,” explained Boyd.
Pets at Home analyses live chat transcripts to help identify ways to improve the responses of its chatbot, which the customer care team have called Chris. “He’s just amazing! When we see the same query repeatedly coming up on live chat, we simply update the options that Chris offers to customers,” said Boyd. “We can have new functionality live in just a couple of weeks.”
Pets at Home is set to push the live chat innovation boundaries even further with the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA), which will be powered by Robiquity RPA.
How the RPA works for a ‘where is my order’ query on live chat:
- Einstein Agent chatbot asks the customer to confirm their order number
- Service Cloud matches the customer order with their online shopping history
- Robiquity RPA checks the status on the order management system and carrier portal and matches this with the original delivery window
- Einstein Agent chatbot provides the customer with an update. If there’s a delay or a problem, they are given the option to reorder or request a refund
- If the customer wants to take a different course of action, the chatbot opens a session with an agent
- Customers can opt to talk to an agent at any point during the process.
“Order enquiries account for around 28% of live chat sessions,” explained Boyd. “With RPA, we will be able to provide customers with a rapid response without the need to involve an agent. It will help to lower our cost to serve.” Pets at Home has already freed up six full-time equivalent (FTE) team members by using RPA for order enquiries. Boyd estimates this could increase to between 8 and 12 FTEs in the future, which will enable the team to focus on other customer support tasks.
11%
of customer care
responses automated
50,000
contacts eliminated in
three months with chatbot
200hrs
saved per week on
live chat interactions
Delivering personalised and proactive customer services.
Pets at Home wants to do more than just react to queries; it wants to proactively reach out to pet owners at significant points during their relationship. “We want to surprise and delight our customers,” said Boyd. “With Service Cloud, we can bring more personalisation and personality to customer care interactions.”
Pets at Home has used the ‘quick action’ functionality in Service Cloud to enable agents to send a physical sentiment card to a customer with just a few clicks. An API connects Service Cloud with the external provider responsible for sending the cards, which are selected and customised by individual agents. “The cards are a great way for us to show empathy – whether it’s welcoming a new kitten to the family, apologising for a problem with a product, or celebrating a life event, such as a marriage,” said Dickinson. “Customers love receiving them – and we love sending them!”
Service Cloud is integrated with the Pets at Home VIP club, which now has a record 7.3 million members. This integration provides agents with visibility of a customer’s VIP purchases and marketing interactions as well as their pets’ names and ages. “With Service Cloud, we can build an instant rapport with a customer,” said Dickinson. “If we want to send a gift, we can select an item from a customer’s VIP club purchase history.”
“With Service Cloud, we can build an instant rapport with a customer.”
“With Service Cloud, we can build an instant rapport with a customer.”
Empowering agents with easier access to knowledge resources.
Pets at Home wants to empower its people by making it easier for them to expand their knowledge and skills base. The customer care team handles around 90,000 cases per month and the queries can be incredibly diverse – especially when it comes to the wellbeing of people’s pets. “One customer contacted us asking for nutrition advice for an albino guinea pig with cataracts. It’s impossible to train every agent for every scenario,” said Boyd. “We want our systems, not the agents, to take the strain.”
To help colleagues find the right answer faster, Pets at Home has created 500+ knowledge articles in Service Cloud. “We can now locate information in a few seconds instead of having to spend several minutes referring to different sources,” said Dickinson.
Pets at Home hopes to bring even greater efficiency and consistency to its customer care operation by deploying Salesforce Flow, which will provide agents with recommended responses and actions for different scenarios. “We want as many queries as possible to be resolved first time,” explained Boyd. “Salesforce Flow will help to reduce the volume of contacts per case and provide agents with the guidance they need to drive incremental sales and deliver added customer value.”
Nurturing and coaching employees is a big focus for Pets at Home. “The customer care agents have to deal with some difficult situations,” said Boyd. “With Service Cloud, we can provide them with the right support at the right time.” For example, team leaders can use Service Cloud’s Omni Supervisor feature to identify if an agent is struggling with a particular case or skill set. “It enables me to provide in the moment assistance and to spot if an agent has a personal issue that might be impacting their wellbeing,” added Dickinson.
Pets at Home also uses the 23 million customer records captured in Service Cloud to evaluate agent performance, track engagement trends, and identify efficiency gains. “Continuous improvement is embedded our culture,” said Boyd. “With Service Cloud, we can encourage customers to use the channels that deliver the fastest response, highest satisfaction, and lowest cost to serve.”
Conclusion
Empowering agents with richer customer insights is key to delivering personalised experiences. “We want our teams to be able to see the entire customer journey, so they can have more relevant conversations,” said Boyd. “Service Cloud has already provided our agents with greater visibility, but there’s still more we can do. By integrating Service Cloud with additional external data sources, we can create an enhanced single view of the customer that enables agents to answer queries even more efficiently and effectively.”
To support its customer 360 ambition, Pets at Home also plans to integrate Service Cloud with Narvar Track Connect and Care from the Salesforce AppExchange. This new functionality will enable agents to track a customer’s online order from dispatch to delivery and quickly see when a carrier reports any exceptions or problems. “Instead of waiting for a customer to contact us, we will be able to proactively update them if their order is going to be delayed,” explained Boyd.
As market trends and digital technologies continue to reshape the pet care market, one thing will remain consistent at Pets at Home: the commitment to its customers and their animal companions. “We want to empower our colleagues to have value-added conversations with customers that span their entire relationship, not just a single transaction,” said Boyd. “With Salesforce, we can continue to blaze a trail in customer service and satisfaction and help more pets and their owners live long and happy lives together.”
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