Home Centre Middle East transforms customer service on social channels
The Challenge
As the leading home retailer in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Home Centre is on a mission to make premium, quality home products more affordable for its customers.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Home Centre Middle East — which covers the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — experienced a surge in purchases and social media inquiries, putting increased pressure on its team to manage customer demand.
Flooded with unprecedented inquiries across its social media accounts, Home Centre Middle East struggled to track, route and respond to messages. It relied on a traditional case escalation process, which posed limitations to issue resolution and scalability.
“We had an opportunity to improve our process for handling social media inquiries and complaints,” says Minna Pauly, Assistant Manager of Social Media at Home Centre Middle East. “It was difficult to get complete clarity across our social accounts, and there was a lot of room for discrepancy in the data.”
Putting its customers first is core to Home Centre’s brand identity and strategy. To keep up with demand and improve customer service on its social accounts, the Home Centre Middle East team needed a plug-and-play solution that is quickly deployable and easily accessible.
The Solution
Recognizing the need for a robust platform to address issues more efficiently, Home Centre Middle East chose Sprinklr Service Self-Serve, an out-of-the-box, self-serve solution that is quick to deploy and easy to use.
Using Sprinklr to manage inbound inquiries on social media has proven immensely beneficial. It brings clarity to our processes, particularly when dealing with a substantial volume of inquiries. While addressing every issue is challenging, the platform helps us prioritize effectively. We can identify high priority and urgent matters, enabling a more focused and efficient response.”
Assistant Manager of Social, Home Centre Middle East
This lightweight but powerful solution aligned with the company’s budget constraints and met its needs for holistic social community management.
Accelerated ability to handle customer inquiries
Home Centre Middle East handles around 10,000 customer inquiries on social media every month. Using AI-driven triaging within the Sprinklr platform, the company can easily identify incoming tickets based on their source, sentiment and complaint or inquiry type. The system sends automatic canned responses and updates ticket fields in real time to capture more information about the customer.
The Home Centre Middle East team has also set up its SLA policy on Sprinklr, ensuring that first response and ticket resolution are completed within designated timeframes. The team now closes 25% more cases within its SLA, thanks to AI-driven triaging and automated ticketing management.
“Using Sprinklr to manage inquiries and complaints on social media has proven immensely beneficial. It brings clarity to our processes, particularly when dealing with a substantial volume of inquiries,” Pauly says. “While addressing every issue is challenging, the Sprinklr platform helps us prioritize effectively. We can identify high-priority and urgent matters, enabling a more focused and efficient response.”
Detailed dashboards for data-driven decisions
Home Centre Middle East leverages Sprinklr’s integrated dashboards to get real-time insights into its customers’ needs on social media. “In a glance, we can see how many tickets we’ve received and whether we’ve met our first response SLA,” Pauly says, which allows the team to react quickly to inquiries and complaints.
With Brand Insights reports, Pauly and her team can benchmark their brand’s performance against competitors and monitor their brand health across social and print channels. “The monthly reports give us further clarity, allowing us to fine-tune our strategy,” she says. “We can use that data to work together as a team to better serve our customers.”
Process modernization supports brand identity
Implementing Sprinklr Service Self-Serve has played a crucial role in enhancing Home Centre Middle East's social care operation. Previously, the company relied on manual customer service processes, which led to delays in addressing inquiries. Because delayed resolutions can frustrate customers and diminish satisfaction levels, ultimately damaging brand reputation and risking loss of customer loyalty, Home Centre sought an AI-powered solution with automation that speeds up agent responses. Features like Sprinklr’s Quick Actions, for example, bring down multiple repetitive actions to a single click, saving time and increasing work efficiency — and contributing to an improved customer experience.
Pauly knows that efficient and responsive customer service solutions are crucial for maintaining a positive brand image and fostering long-term customer relationships.
“It’s 2024. We shouldn’t be using outdated systems to manage the customer experience,” she says. “Sprinklr is helping us become more technologically advanced, so we can be more efficient, improve our social community management and better understand our brand health.”
The Outcome
Within six months of implementing Sprinklr, Home Centre Middle East enhanced its ability to manage interactions with customers on social media.
Homecentre accelerated its response time to customer inquiries and improved the quality of its data and reporting. Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform has helped Home Centre Middle East:
- Close 25% more cases within its SLA
- Improve its average handling time by 5 minutes 16 seconds
- Resolve tickets 99% faster on average
“Sprinklr has significantly improved our approach to handling customer interactions, streamlining processes and enhancing responsiveness,” Pauly says. “Now that we’re familiar with the platform, we can take our learnings and apply them to use Sprinklr to its full potential.”