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AppWay is an international company based in the UK and Switzerland. Their primary focus is establishing long-term customer relationships with customers and other companies. They provide customer service in a scalable manner while their company does not need to invest in a 24/7 customer support and training system. AppWay strongly believes that communication and personalization are critical to a successful business.
Our main stakeholder Jonathan Smith (Global Customer Advocate Director), mentioned that the hyper-growth of the business and providing the same level of customer satisfaction and personalization became difficult as the number of customers and their customers increased exponentially. However, it wasn’t easy to follow this growth regarding hiring, staff management & training. AppWay implemented Salesforce as their CRM system, including Sales & Service Cloud, when they established the company in 2012. According to Jonathan’s statistics, their NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) have decreased by 15-20 % since last year and are continuously declining. We at KloudBlaze believe that to provide a successful implementation, we need to fully understand the business’s pain points and deep-dive their processes which could triage the source of their problems. Our business analyst team intensely worked together with mostly the Customer Service team of AppWay for a month to analyze and document all the processes in BPMN (Business Process Model & Notation) and multiple live documents, which could be extended anytime by the business.
Our results were confirmed with AppWay’s Customer Service Team and our key stakeholder Jonathan. A significant factor to consider is that AppWay provides 24/7 support. Furthermore, on average, 2-3 customer service representatives work with a customer throughout their sales lifecycle and support.
We have highlighted the results potentially contributing to the constant decline of customer satisfaction KPIs:
- The main form of customer communication is 87% through WhatsApp, which is handled on a separate application. Communication is copy-pasted by staff manually to Salesforce as notes or tasks (depending on user preference).
- Emails are sent from Outlook and are not integrated with Salesforce; some users use the email functionality from Salesforce (approximately 700 emails are sent daily)
- Customer feedback & related surveys are sent each month randomly by the team leads of Customer Service Representative groups.
- Customer handover is handled verbally and using google sheets to keep up-to-date internal comments about customers.
The Team, including AppWay and KloudBlaze, saw a pattern and picked the top 5 relevant issues from many more, but it was clear that the CRM is not used to its’ best potential. After an extended analysis and documentation, we brainstormed with our salesforce architect, developers, and business analysts to develop a process improvement that could help AppWay.
- The lack of personalization and ineffective communication could be caused by the disorganized information about the customer. WhatsApp communication can’t be picked up effectively by a customer representative due to human error; it could not be up-to-date. Communication with the customer on the phone either takes too much time (average 3-4 minutes based on calls shadowed by the team) as overviewing/collecting information takes time to open in multiple tabs and also reach out to other team members, or simply the data is not present in the CRM nor anywhere else as it’s not logged.
- Communication templates always differ as they are stored in a shared excel file which can’t be managed in a scalable manner. Moreover, service representatives must send out a communication template at almost every stage of the customer lifecycle, which is time-consuming.
- The second most-used communication channel (e-mail) also lacks proper logging and overview as it occurs outside of the CRM most of the time.
- Surveys are sent manually and could be biased feedback as the surveys are sent to the chosen recipients only and, very importantly, not at the right time. The affected customer’s case could have been closed a month ago when the team sent out a survey, which will either be not responded to or simply the event, and the experience faded away in the customer’s mind. The feedback collection should be the closest to the specific, defined customer journey milestone as possible.
- Multiple customer representatives are working on a specific opportunity or case. However, the handover still stays partially manual with the verbal handover, which could cause short-term and long-term problems in reviewing the history of the customer.
Multiple implementations must co-efficiently work together to provide measurable success to our customers.
- Implement WhatsApp integration with existing Heroku PaaS (platform as a service). This will allow the customer service team to see and communicate with their customers at a specific stage in the customer journey. Furthermore, the communication will stay in one place, allowing any representative to review past communication. In addition, the managers can review on a daily/weekly basis on a dashboard or via snapshot reporting the quantity of communication and read/received messages. Qualitative measurements (sentiment analysis) are out of scope for now.
- Implement Salesforce for Outlook out-of-box integration, allowing email syncing to customer/account-related opportunities from outlook to Salesforce as emails.
- Use out-of-box email templates and a custom object to keep dynamic WhatsApp templates, which can be triggered automatically at the defined customer journey milestones. These structures mainstream communication and return precious time for service representatives to focus on building customer relationships.
- After implementing the communication channels through Salesforce, defining the specific stages where we would like to collect customer feedback will be a breeze. Using Salesforce Surveys, we can quickly generate great surveys which could be automatically sent out when there is a specific case closed, an opportunity stage has changed, or even when there is secure communication through WhatsApp, which will allow Jonathan and his team to collect feedback at the right time and further understand the segmented areas of improvement.
As with every implementation, it takes time to analyze the results of our work, including direct & indirect operations. We have provided direct support to AppWay for two months as part of our hyper-care methodology, allowing us and our customers to fine-tune their solution. The following key metrics were achieved:
- 25% increased capacity of team members on personal communication
- 30% increase in customer retention due to a simple and blazing-fast overview of customer communication and the highlight of live status
- 80% faster strategic & data-based decisions with reports on customer communication
- 12% increase in customer engagement via WhatsApp & measurable response to surveys
Are you interested in how Salesforce can help optimize your sales processes, or do you want to discuss potential opportunities with our Salesforce business consultants? Contact us by clicking the button below or call us at our phone number.
Phone number: +41 78 408 4556. You can contact us by using the same number on WhatsApp 