Woolworths NZ, part of Woolworths Group, is a leading retailer in New Zealand, providing a wide range of groceries, fresh produce and household items to more than 3 million customers every week across New Zealand. Their mission is to ‘Make Kiwi lives a little better every day’, by offering quality products and excellent service at great prices, emphasising sustainability and community engagement.
The Opportunity
Woolworths aspired to deliver a more meaningful call centre experience for customers by creating a seamless experience for its agents, while improving productivity and reducing operational risk. To achieve this, Woolworths NZ embarked on a modernisation journey to transform delivery of customer service in its call centre.
The challenge was complex: help the customer care team redefine their business processes to leverage industry proven best practices, replace 15+ years of outdated and home grown legacy technology, implement Salesforce Service Cloud and integrate with more than 10 enterprise applications managed by different teams across Woolworths Group.
To achieve this, Woolworths sought a partner with a combination of Retail domain experience, demonstrated success delivering enterprise-level Salesforce solutions, and expertise in guiding businesses through connected change across people, process, information and technology.
ClearPoint emerged as the ideal collaborator due to its proven track record as a trusted digital partner, deep understanding of Salesforce capabilities and wider expertise of integrated cloud technologies, and commitment to helping customers get the best return on their investment by designing and delivering solutions that are both relevant and sustainable.
The Approach
ClearPoint partnered with Woolworths NZ to define, design and deliver a solution that reduced time to resolution and improved time to onboard new agents, ultimately enabling service agents to focus on what they enjoy most.
The engagement started with an interactive discovery and design approach focused on helping business and technical stakeholders collectively identify and define the change, translate this into a shared future state, and understand how the change would be implemented. This approach enabled a seamless transition into the implementation phase.
ClearPoint implemented Salesforce Service Cloud with complex integrations across Woolworths that enabled process and workflow automation, significantly improving service efficiency and effectiveness.
Given the breadth of change, collaboration and communication was key to success of the implementation phase that relied on changes to be delivered across multiple teams. An incremental approach to change ensured meaningful value was able to be delivered early and often.
In addition, due to competing priorities and capacity limitations within Woolworths, the ability for ClearPoint to quickly augment other teams with additional capabilities also played a key role in ensuring the project was delivered on time and within budget.
ClearPoint has a high calibre team who are a pleasure to work with and enabled us to achieve outcomes across multiple areas.”
- Stephanie Welch, Head of Loyalty, Woolworths NZ
The Outcome
Where agents previously had to work across 12 different windows to gather a connected view of the customer, the implementation of Salesforce reduced this to a ‘single pane of glass’. Agents can now log into one platform that provides a single reliable view of a customer’s support history, online shopping orders, refunds and rewards, while also being able to interact with clients across multiple channels from a single platform. With access to the right information at the right time, the project team was also able to automate tasks, reducing cognitive load on agents and shortening the time for new agents to onboard.
Together these benefits resulted in an improvement in overall average handling time when looking across calls, emails and chats. Also important was that the solution architecture leveraged proven best practices to ensure the outcome was both stable and sustainable for Woolworths.
In addition to the technology and process efficiencies, ClearPoint’s approach focused on ensuring Woolworths was able to successfully own the communications, training and roll-out of the benefits to the wider user groups, with ClearPoint’s support.
We've significantly improved and enhanced the way the Woolworths Customer Care team works, and we are excited about the potential for further enhancements that Salesforce has to offer us.”
- Mark Wolfenden, Digital Director, Woolworths NZ.
The Continued partnership
Beyond go-live, ClearPoint was able to ensure continuity for ongoing enhancements and innovations by seamlessly establishing an embedded squad within the Woolworths Digital Tribe, while Woolworths built out their own Salesforce capabilities.
The collaboration between Woolworths NZ, ClearPoint, and Salesforce delivered an important milestone in Woolworths' modernisation journey. By adopting industry leading CRM technology, best practice architecture, optimising processes, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, Woolworths NZ is equipped to deliver excellent customer service and operational efficiency well into the future.
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