Swedish home-furnishings retailer, Ikea has developed an omnichannel experience for its customers in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.
It is working with CX (customer experience) management platform Sprinklr and it hopes the improved customer experience will help the company to gather data to optimise business decision-making.
The same system will also be implemented by the company in its Mexican operations.
Ikea Southeast Asia’s Manager, Customer Care Centre, Alex Soliman, told iTnews Asia that customers interact with the brand via third-party social media platforms - especially Facebook and WhatsApp – and the lack of visibility and flexibility to interact with customers makes the brand reactive rather than proactive.
Sprinklr is helping Ikea with the social media integration of Facebook, a chatbot component, and WhatsApp online messenger into the platform, enabling conversational commerce.
Conversational commerce refers to businesses and their customers interacting in real time via traditional messaging apps.
According to Soliman, handling customers’ concerns with a single channel eliminates the need for customers to contact the company via any other channels and this leads to a "20 percent reduction in cost for the group".
Explaining how the system works, he added that after analysing historical data, the team decides internally on a reply timeframe to avoid customers jumping to other channels to get in touch.
Soliman added that since going live with Sprinklr, Ikea has been able to answer over 95 percent of all inbound queries from customers in the timeframe.
Post implementation, over 94 percent of post comments or sentiments from customers are "non-negative", he said.
Ikea uses Sprinklr to gather data, analyse sentiments, categorise different sets of customer enquiries, and provide reporting capabilities to internal teams for business decision-making.
The team receives managed services from Sprinklr, where a dedicated resource helps in the planning, structuring and implementation of the procured components.
It is also working to equip customers not living in close proximity to physical stores with remote planning via the department in their buying journey.
The group is “transitioning” its core system from on-premises to a cloud-based solution to enable agility and flexibility in overall centre operations, said Soliman.
Proactive response to queries
Soliman added that customers want convenience, quick solutions, and self-service, rather than calling or mailing customer care.
After careful evaluation of offerings from five vendors, Ikea decided to go with Sprinklr.
With Sprinklr, Ikea integrates the Facebook plug-in with the platform gaining data insights and better reporting capabilities to proactively respond to customer queries.
Soliman said the brand uses WhatsApp as a communication channel – popular in all the markets, except Thailand - to handle customers’ enquiries, shorten issues resolution time, and help customers complete the interaction in one go.
The team has also added chatbots to help customers self-serve and respond to queries via non-voice channels, including chat, SMS, and email.
“We are looking to further integrate via webchat on the website, where customers can find order status and product inventory checks,” Soliman said.
He added Ikea will tap Sprinklr to use historical data and predictive analytics capabilities to form a single data repository across all markets for better scheduling and resource forecasting capabilities.
This will help with resource optimisation and intra-day adjustments.
The group has also upgraded its legacy ERP system to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for improving demand forecasting, reducing costs and increasing stock accuracy, Soliman said.
