This organisation is an industrial distributor for customers across a range of industries.
Needing to rethink their digital customer experience to better understand the ownership journey, the company started with the design and build of a brand new Sitecore website in 2019. With their site well and truly up and running, the company was ready to get more out of Sitecore and start harnessing marketing automation to bolster their customer communications.
Marketing Automation to assist key business conversations
With the call centre coming under pressure from increased volume, the business knew they needed to use Sitecore to take some of their more complex business processes and turn them into digital experiences. Their overall objective was to reduce call centre traffic and improve customer experience through survey scores. In doing this, they also wanted to increase the amount of identified known contacts in Sitecore using email marketing to provide more cross and up-sell opportunities to the sales and marketing teams.
Research, monitoring, and analysis identified that the enquiries focused on three key business functions:
- Customer enquiries about parts that had already been dispatched and were in transit
- Invoice specifics about pre-sales and post-sales service management
- Follow up and confirmation of recovering customer cores.
Specifically, the company wanted to take these three key business functions and use Sitecore marketing Automation to reduce call centre traffic without losing their historical face-to-face engagement with customers in remote areas.
The Stack
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Sitecore on Microsoft Azure PaaS
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Dataweavers for Sitecore
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Azure API Management
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Bespoke CRM x Sitecore
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Triggerfish EXM Accelerator
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MBlox SMS Services
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Qualtrics x Sitecore x Dynamics AX
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Sitecore Experience Profile
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Global Scaling
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Sitecore List Manager
API on Sitecore xConnect for Parts Distribution Communications
The business needed to trigger communications based on data fields matching ‘in stock’ or ‘out of stock’ - but didn’t have a data model that supported those fields xDB for Sitecore to identify. This nuance across the systems created an opportunity for Triggerfish to deliver an API on Sitecore xConnect that allows Microsoft Dynamics AX and the parts status system to send communications through to Sitecore.
After the API implementation and integrating the systems, Sitecore looks up the customer based on their unique ID and routes an email or text message to that customer notifying them that their part is in stock and ready for collection from their appropriate business centre. The system also alerts customers that the part is out for delivery or is due to be delivered.
Intersecting Customers at the right time for service management
Secondly, the company needed to find a way to intersect the post-service, pre-invoice interaction with its customers, and used a Qualtrics Sitecore integration to solve the problem.
Integrated with the bespoke CRM, the Qualtrics survey scores are sent to the CRM, with any scores below an agreed number triggering a business workflow to escalate the incident to the Account Manager – giving them the power to pick up the phone and intercept that problem before the invoicing process starts. This digital process de-humanises the feedback cycle so that customers feel confident to give honest feedback without compromising the often friendly and long-standing relationships they have made with service technicians in remote service centres.
Reducing value burden of outstanding parts
A ‘core’ is a core piece of equipment within a machine such as an engine or a gearbox. When cores wear out, they can be returned back to for refurbishment. The challenge faced by the business was the number of outstanding cores that had not been returned for refurbishment.
Triggerfish used Sitecore Marketing Automation to send automated emails to customers reminding them of their outstanding cores. Sitecore uses tokens in the email to identify the customer, their part being delivered, and the part being returned. The email includes instructions on how to book a pickup, a link to the PDF copy of the invoice and how to log into their digital portal to see all outstanding cores in one view. The process of recovering outstanding cores was a very manual, timely and expensive program.
Bringing together Marketing and Technology
The 90-day cycle has bought the internal marketing team and the parent IT team together, helping both teams understand marketing's role in the overarching customer experience of the business.
The marketing team now also have a better understanding of the value of integrating Sitecore with the back-office technologies like Dynamics AX, Qualtrics and their bespoke CRM.
Digital Connections for customers who cherish face-to-face interaction
Founded in the 30s, this business and their customers are familiar with doing business face-to-face, in the outback, on the construction site or on the side of a road. With many customers of living or working hundreds or thousands of kilometres from any business centre, the business needed to have 100% confidence in Platform and its integrations. If the technology failed, customers could drive for up to a day to collect a part that had not yet been delivered to their nearest business centre.
As the business becomes more complex in a digital world, it was important for the business to reliably and comfortably replace some of those human connections digitally to the advantage of the customer first – and this business has been able to accomplish that with Sitecore.
