Personalizing customer care

Adjusting to digital buying habits

For the last five years, Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services (BRS), the number two player worldwide in employee benefits and engagement, has been focused on accelerating digital transformation in response to market transitions. Its goal is to bring to life a personalized and sustainable employee experience at work and beyond.

“Our market moved from paper to card and mobile,” said Thibault Guerard, VP of Customer Experience and Care at Sodexo BRS. “Today, four out of five customer interactions and requests are processed digitally through online orders, QR codes, card and mobile payments, along with digital-first courier partners.”

Global CX transformation strategy

With over 1,500 agents and contact centers in over 30 countries, Sodexo BRS manages conversations and relationships locally. But it needed to ramp up its digital strategy and standardize its global service operations.

Due to multiple contact center systems, diverse work practices and varying customer expectations, it was challenged to drive consistent CX and cost efficiency. The enforced shift to home working during the COVID-19 pandemic only magnified these challenges.

“The pandemic expedited the change from a traditional B2B model to a personalized B2C-style care system more in tune with customers’ new buying habits,” said Guerard.

Sodexo BRS launched a major program to standardize its CX strategy worldwide. “Our goal was to place the customer at the heart of everything we do,” added Guerard. “That meant accelerating cloud innovation and our digital channel rollout — in turn simplifying our processes, improving our productivity and enhancing customer experience.”

The company rigorously screened market offerings against strict criteria. It needed a solution with advanced cloud capabilities and best-in-class CRM and case management systems.

“We felt Genesys combined with Salesforce CRM was the strongest combination to support multiple workflows, agent multi-tasking and easy API integration for efficient self-service and customer recognition,” said Guerard. “And in Genesys, we got a professional services team who would stay the course and work with us on a multi-year global rollout.”

Sodexo BRS was also looking for a vendor that could provide maximum flexibility due to the varying nature of its markets and how customers across the globe prefer to engage. “In some markets voice and email are the most popular channels and in others it’s messaging apps,” said Guerard. “So, we wanted to be sure we could flex services by country — for example, WhatsApp in Brazil. Genesys allows us to do that.”

Carefully phased implementation

Sodexo BRS took a phased approach to consolidation, ensuring complex requests were prioritized. It took the most heavily used channels — inbound calls, email, and SMS — and onboarded 200 agents in Belgium to ensure customer satisfaction remained high. And it applied self-service models to common inquiries like balance checks, PIN resets and lost cards, which can now be processed using via the Sodexo BRS website or mobile app.

Genesys Workforce Engagement Management empowers the company’s supervisors to accurately monitor agent performance, spot coaching needs and provide constructive feedback. Routine jobs, such as preparing forecasts and reports, are automated and consume less time. Other essential tasks, such as matching routing policies to agent skill sets, are simple to manage.

Sodexo BRS has taken automation a step further by integrating Genesys Cloud with natural language understanding platform Google Cloud Dialogflow.

“To be more efficient in email routing and classification, we’re launching a linguistic text recognition solution,” said Guerard. “With our Genesys platform, it was also pretty easy to test chatbots with Google Cloud natural language recognition.”

Popular with customers and employees

Sodexo BRS has already realized major benefits from Genesys Cloud. “We very quickly obtained a 10% gain in agent productivity through improved handling and Salesforce CRM integration,” said Guerard.

“By associating any existing customer data from our CRM — like personal information, purchase details or their preferences — with real-time interaction data, we now have more context about a customer when they reach out, whether through our self-service or live agent channels. This in turn is helping to create a more connected, personalized experience, which our staff and customers really value. In terms of change success, we measured agent satisfaction and saw stronger commitment for the new tools.”

With happier agents contributing to happier customers, CSAT scores have increased by more than 35% over the last two years, from 3.1 to 4.2 out of 5.0. Next in line to migrate to Genesys is Brazil — a huge market where 500 agents manage up to 10,000 interactions daily — along with France, the Czech Republic, Spain and Romania. Sodexo BRS is also considering Genesys Predictive Engagement to help optimize and personalize website journeys with AI-powered customer engagement.

“Thanks to Genesys integration with Salesforce and the breadth of omnichannel capabilities, we now have a global CX platform for accelerating growth and standardizing operations around the world,” concluded Guerard. “We can migrate countries with up to 200 agents in between six and 12 weeks.”