Delivering a great customer experience isn’t just about having the best app or delivering a purchase on time. It consists of a whole raft of interactions – from enabling the customer to place an order quickly, to seamless omnichannel service.
We spoke to Daniel Gebler, CTO at online supermarket Picnic. Below, he explains how he’s leveraging the company’s data for an enhanced customer experience at every touchpoint.
1. Use experimentation and customer feedback to underpin your services
There are a few obvious principles that underpin a great experience. This includes intuitive apps, friendly service, and more. However, every business is different. So to optimise customer engagement, you need to find out what works best for your business and your customers. And the only way to do that is to experiment.
“The customer experience is art, science, and data combined,” says Gebler. “The first thing every company should start with is experimentation, because only then can you learn in a structured way what works for your customers - and what doesn’t.”
In particular, if you’re building a new service, it’s ideal to co-create it with your customers.
“Take the first iteration, share it with your customers, and develop it further based on the feedback data you get.”
Picnic is taking this approach all the time – in fact, it’s trying out 20 to 30 new things every week to accelerate innovation. However, they do this with just a few customers at a time before rolling out its successes universally.
“It helps us quickly evolve our services with confidence that they’re working well for our customers,” adds Gebler.
2. Build a 360-degree view of the customer
With the customer experience extending across multiple departments, it’s also important to ensure teams can collaborate effectively to deliver a joined-up and enhanced customer experience. We found that 75% of consumers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 65% say they often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives.
To avoid this scenario, you need to build a 360-degree view of every customer. As Gebler confirms, “Separate views on the ordering experience, the point of sale, fulfilment, or the doorstep delivery are not enough. You need a consolidated view of the entire customer journey.”
Picnic achieves this with Salesforce. In early 2020, the company consolidated eight different solutions into Service Cloud. As a result, it has integrated front- and back-end systems, streamlined customer operations, and created a template for rolling out the business in other countries.
Service Cloud has also been vital to setting up a scalable customer care centre to handle an increasing workload and reduced the number of clicks per case from 27 to just seven. This has not only improved customer satisfaction but also empowered Picnic’s employees to work more efficiently, boosting their experience as well.
3. Democratise data to enhance the customer experience
Another recommendation from Gebler that will impact employees, as well as customers, is to open up your data across the company. By making data available, you can enable employees to make better decisions, whether they’re trying to resolve a customer issue or responding to a query.
Data democratisation is not only about making better in-the-moment decisions, but also fueling greater innovation.
“If you make data available across the entire organisation, then people will come up with new ideas that the business would never have stumbled upon otherwise. It can really boost innovation.”
But to achieve the benefits, you need to trust people and document what you learn as you go. “Not every decision will be right, so you need to be able to look back to see why something did or didn’t work out,” says Gebler. “What did you expect? What did you learn? These are important points that need to be captured so you can uncover how best to use your data and serve your customers.”
By using data imaginatively, other companies can improve their key metrics, just like Picnic has - from case handling times to CSAT scores. All of which add up to enhance the customer experience.
Find out more about how Service Cloud helps organisations get greater value from their data and enhance the customer experience.
Build end-to-end engagement from anywhere
Give your customers an all-digital, end-to-end experience they will love with Service Cloud and Slack.
