Global brand distributor True Alliance pivots to digital in response to COVID-19, supported by Salesforce and Merkle.

Since 1982, True Alliance has helped more than 20 of the world’s most famous brands build their businesses and achieve success in Australia and New Zealand, including market leaders like Speedo, The North Face, and Coach. And True Alliance’s impressive portfolio continues to grow with more recent additions to its brand portfolio, including Under Armour, Gap, Banana Republic and Ellesse.

Challenge

True Alliance started their journey with Salesforce in 2012, when they implemented Sales Cloud to build the capability to gain new insights into customers and build personalised customer engagement. 

In early 2020 Covid-19 caused city centres and retail stores to close and as a business that operates within the retail space with a traditional store-front model True Alliance was greatly impacted. 

As sales shifted quickly to online True Alliance experienced a 600% increase in the volume of enquiries to their customer support teams which placed a huge amount of strain on business resources. Due to the siloed nature of True Alliance’s existing systems, customer care agents were required to access data across five separate systems to respond appropriately to a customer enquiry. This led to a drastic drop in customer satisfaction, as indicated by CSAT score. In addition, the siloed systems also caused a disconnect in the flow of critical customer information across teams, leading to inefficient customer management and communication. 

True Alliance turned to Salesforce and Merkle to create a solution that would allow them to respond to the new volume of customer enquiries while maintaining an excellent customer experience. 

Solution

The team at Merkle worked closely with True Alliance to create an Agile delivery plan that delivered functionality over a series of sprints.

Service Cloud was implemented to give True Alliance a single and consistent view of their customer, including their lifetime value, order status, interactions, purchases, orders and returns. 

Einstein Bots have been configured for each of the 16 brands. Customers can use the bots to get answers to routine questions without the need for a customer service representative to become involved.

“Our customer service agents are able to have more value-added conversations and answer customers’ questions about different products. They are acting more as sales agents, and we see that reflected in conversion rates,” – Roni Pelov – Chief Financial Officer, True Alliance

Results

The re-platforming of True Alliance has led the company to reap many rewards including:

• Chatbots respond to around 30% of all customer enquiries, which allows the customer service team to focus on the queries that need a human response.
• The time-saving capabilities of templated responses have increased the quality of customer service, leading to a rise in customer satisfaction.
• Creating a ‘Single Pane of Glass’ has increased visibility and transparency across the organisation, allowing marketing and customer service teams to gain a holistic view of the customer.
• Finally – True Alliance have experienced zero system downtime since switching to Salesforce.