Hema creates exceptional simplicity for customer service

In an industry that sees such intense competition as retail, the customer experience represents a massive differentiating factor that can cause people to choose one brand over another. HEMA, a renowned Dutch retail company that operates close to 750 stores and sells more than 32,000 own-brand products and services with a focus on the Benelux and French markets, wanted to enhance the support provided to its customers. In order to support its vision of creating a better everyday life in a more beautiful world, the company envisioned a future in which it was more customer-centric and more focused on encouraging loyalty.

As part of this vision, HEMA launched an initiative to provide a top-notch omnichannel experience to its customers. By doing so, the company intended to become easier to connect with, lower the length of response times, and generate more cross-sales opportunities. This meant providing more accurate solutions to customer queries and empowering customer service representatives to provide expert advice on the company’s products.

Salesforce-based customer service

To accomplish all of this, HEMA selected Capgemini as its solution implementation partner. Together, the organizations launched a thorough review of the challenges and expected results to ensure that they shared a mutual understanding of the project. This led HEMA and Capgemini to select the Salesforce Service Cloud and Social Studio as the solution best fit to situation.

As a single, collaborative team, the partners employed Agile project methodology to ensure a fast, successful deployment of the Salesforce-based solution that was aligned with the original project goals. A combined team of experts drew upon a wide range of expertise while ensuring constant cooperation between HEMA and Capgemini to replace or integrate a large set of different technologies within five months. Whenever possible, the partners utilized out-of-the-box solutions as well as Salesforce Service Cloud best practices to build a sustainable and future-proof platform.

The project team followed a parallel development of a new event-driven architecture, which was integrated order, customer, and product data objects with Salesforce using platform events. By doing so, HEMA and Capgemini enabled a variety of other key projects, which has resulted in more than 600 user stories being implemented as well as over 150 customer support agents undergoing training. In addition, the team engaged in the redesign of internal processes, which resulted in a new way of working and streamlined operations at HEMA.

HEMA and Capgemini: co-creation

With the Salesforce Service Cloud, HEMA employees now have a unified view of their customers through analytics and integrated telephony tools, ensuring that the entire customer support team has the right information and insight necessary to provide superior assistance. This in turn enables the company to differentiate itself from the competition by guaranteeing that shoppers have an engaging and distinctive experience.

Thanks to this more in-depth understanding of shopper needs and interests as well as improved responsiveness on the part of HEMA agents, the company has seen a marked improvement in customer satisfaction as measured by CSAT, CES, and NPS scores. This new approach has also opened the door to new cross-selling and upselling opportunities while targeted automation reduces the need for manual work. As the customer experience has improved, so has the employee journey, which helps HEMA to maintain and expand its talented pool of agents.

In a crowded industry, it is essential for companies to find ways to separate themselves from the pack. Through its Salesforce-based solution, HEMA has done just that while simultaneously preparing itself for the future.