How boAt keeps customers at the heart of its business with Sprinklr Service
The Challenge
Founded in 2016 with a vision of making consumer electronics fashionable, boAt is one of the largest audio and tech wearable brands in India.
We are trying to become an intelligent enterprise, where decisions are not made on intuition or whims, but data-led insights. This is why we’re setting up a data analytics practice from the ground up, and Sprinklr is one of the key platforms.”
Chief Information Officer, boAt
While the company started out with a focus on audio devices and gadgets, it's now venturing into developing smart wearables. At boAt, customers are always at the center of everything the company does do. The brand’s core mission is to elevate people’s lifestyles in an affordable way by providing luxury audio and entertainment technology at attractive prices. In order to do so effectively, the team embarked on a digital transformation journey in 2021, implementing Sprinklr to help provide a solid, data-driven foundation to support its growth journey.
“To give customers what they want, we need to continuously listen to what's happening out there in the market. What are our consumers generally talking about? What features are they looking for in a product?” says Shashwat Singh, Chief Information Officer at boAt. “By listening to all the chatter on social channels, our goal is to provide our customers with what they want while maintaining a very attractive price point.”
boAt was looking for a unified solution that would enable it to:
- Listen and engage in brand-relevant conversations
- Create a holistic, end-to-end customer experience by identifying and resolving customer issues quickly and efficiently
- Increase employee productivity with workflow transparency
- Speed up the claims and warranty process with AI technology
The Solution
In an effort to streamline operations and become a customer-centric business, boAt implemented Sprinklr Insights and Sprinklr Service to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint.
Keeping customers at the heart of everything
At boAt, customer experience doesn’t end at the point of purchase, or even at the after-sales service. According to Rakshit Gupta, Head of Customer Experience, Strategy and Operations at boAt, customer experience is the end-to-end journey that people have with the company and their products. “Every interaction we have with our customers needs to be a good and holistic experience.”
Gupta says boAt measures two key areas across all of its channels: quality and speed. Quality is defined as the level of customer satisfaction with the interaction, and that is measured through Sprinklr’s AI-powered CSAT Prediction and automated surveys. Metrics for speed include the time it takes for customers to reach agents and how quickly their issues can be resolved. All of these are measured and recorded in the Sprinklr dashboard for easy reference and review.
Before implementing Sprinklr, the customer service team recorded all incident escalations on spreadsheets. “We didn’t have data around the kind of experience our customer service officers were delivering or how efficiently teams worked. Neither did we have a source of truth that we could use to train new employees,” explains Gupta. Now, the customer experience team, comprising around 140 people, works from the Sprinklr platform about 90% of the time, using the platform to collaborate across teams to share feedback.
With around 10,000 customer requests every day, the Sprinklr dashboard also provides workflow transparency, which enables management to identify new ways to boost productivity, based on data. They can see agents’ average turnaround time for handling customer concerns or learn how quickly agents are able to move from one call to another — and make adjustments as needed.
“I think the holistic nature of Sprinklr Service and how it brings together everything in one place is the major charm of the platform,” says Gupta.
Providing uninterrupted cross-channel customer experience
From voice calls to email and social media platforms, like WhatsApp, customers reach out to boAt on many different channels. The challenge, then, is tying together every point of communication and making sense of it, so that when the same customer reaches out again, they can pick up where they left off without having to repeat themselves.
“Our goal is to give the customer a seamless experience by bringing together and making sense of everything they have said,” explains Singh. When customers first reach out to the customer care team, they are greeted by a bot. However, when they get transferred to a human agent, the expectation is that they should be able to carry on with the conversation without any hiccups. “When the human agent comes in to take over, they should know exactly what has happened so far and get on to solving the problem.”
When boAt first implemented Sprinklr, the team moved records of earlier calls, emails and warranty data to the Sprinklr dashboard, and the advantage of the new platform was immediately clear to company leadership. “I was able to pick up one particular ticket, where I could see the entire line of communication with that customer. It included every conversation the team had with the customer, and I could even listen to call recordings. That was truly a ‘wow’ moment for me because I did not have that kind of visibility prior to Sprinklr,” says Pankaj Raut, Vice President of Supply Chains at boAt.
Speeding up the warranty process with accuracy
As a wearable technology company, warranty is a big part of boAt’s business. Every day, around 6,000 warranty claims come through their system. To speed up the process, the team leverages Sprinklr’s optical character recognition (OCR) capability to automatically extract and validate information from the invoices submitted.
“With Sprinklr’s OCR technology, we can now scan and validate invoices in real time, providing a uniform, seamless experience to our customers. So whether they're talking on the phone or interacting with us through Facebook or Instagram, we can give them the same information within the same amount of time, and that has tremendously helped us improve the customer journey,” says Raut. He says the platform is also able to identify if a product is within warranty or if the documents a customer provides, such as invoices, are legitimate.
Moving from reactive to proactive, predictive to preventive
As a startup that’s growing at lightning speed, Raut believes that the next opportunity is to have a community of users who would organically market boAt’s products. His vision is to have a community around the brand that promotes boAt products to their friends, which will require not just quality products, but unrivaled customer experience.
“More than just having a piece of technology, how we choose to tie it back to the business process is key,” says Singh. “A true ‘aha’ moment for us would be when we are able to make an outbound call to a consumer, who is just about to raise a complaint to us. That’s the level of specificity we want to achieve, and I believe this is possible with Sprinklr.”
The Outcome
Consolidating several point solutions onto the Sprinklr platform, boAt is creating a unified experience for both its customers and employees.
Since launch, the company has onboarded 140 employees to the Sprinklr platform, tracked and analyzed some 10,000 customer touchpoints, and validated more than 6,000 warranty claims in real time. This kind of visibility into customer interactions is exactly what boAt was looking for when it began its digital transformation journey.
“To create a truly seamless customer experience, we need the technology that enables us to have visibility across every touchpoint, and then be able to integrate that capability into our business,” says Singh. “I believe that together, we can change the entire landscape and redefine customer experience by providing an unparalleled customer service journey.”