Executive summary

Samsung Benelux wanted to build something that didn’t exist yet: they wanted to transform their traditional contact center into a digital-first, data-driven contact center. They started building their vision with their previous vendor, but that vendor didn’t have the infrastructure Samsung Benelux needed to make the leap into the digital era. When Samsung Benelux decided to partner with Khoros and Teleperformance for digital customer service and an online brand community, they began their digital-first transformation.

The goal for Samsung Benelux was to empower agents to communicate with customers as they communicate with friends. But customers weren’t happy with the traditional channels Samsung Benelux offered. So, with support from Khoros, Samsung Benelux built an online response team to respond to customers on three branded channels (community, members app, and social media) WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. With the Khoros Community plus the Khoros Care integration, Samsung Benelux can now do everything from one screen, a single UI. For example, the social team can work with the Facebook public while also handling private community conversations.

Automation and chatbots were the other keys to Samsung Benelux’s success. Their messaging channels were so popular that inbound volumes greatly increased, so Samsung Benelux adopted both front-end and back-end automation to help manage all of the conversations. Samsung’s customer-facing bots automate quick answers to predictable questions, while their agents also have access to specific process automation bots that they can introduce into the conversation to automate longer, routine tasks like troubleshooting or collecting information. This frees up agents for more complex, higher-value tasks that are best suited for human problem-solving skills.

The next step for Samsung Benelux is optimization and direct integrations within their channels. They want to help their customers select the best product using a consolidated digital-first approach across their site, community, and messaging. Samsung Benelux wants to build a virtual marketplace with a personal touch that utilizes current channels and makes it easy to add future channels as they’re released. Also on the horizon is Samsung Benelux’s work building towards their vision of a fully automated shopping experience that connects product web pages, messaging channels, chatbots, and human sales staff. So far they’ve seen an increase in conversations and high first-call resolution. They now have everything in place to make the transformation from a contact center handling customers to substantially contributing to sales and lifetime customer value. Their fully automated shopping experience is the first tangible result of this transformation, and it’s digital-first.

Results

The improvements that Samsung Benelux was able to accomplish by partnering with Khoros for Care and Community were so vast that they were able to completely switch off email as a channel. Samsung Benelux is now empowered like never before to truly connect with customers on a personal level, and they are having more customer conversations with fewer agents.