Sunny

Reinventing maritime retail with Salesforce

Embark on the inspiring journey of Sunny, the premier maritime retailer renowned for its exceptional customer service and duty-free offerings. Faced with the tides of change during a global pandemic, Sunny navigated through uncharted waters by embracing digital transformation. This customer success story unfolds how Sunny, with the help of Salesforce and valantic, revolutionized its business model, enhanced customer engagement, and set sail towards a future of digital innovation.

Streamlining sales and service operations with integrated CRM solution
Streamlining sales and service operations with integrated CRM solution

The challenge

In recent years, Sunny’s business model has changed fundamentally. Sunny’s representatives used to board a ship to promote their products and take orders directly from seafarers. Seafarers could also disembark and visit Sunny’s luxury showroom in Antwerp, where they received personal guidance and could buy various products. Over the past decades, Sunny’s reputation was built through strong customer relations and excellent service. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, no one could get on or off a ship. Sunny had to drastically switch to a more digital approach when their sales dropped by almost 100%. In a few weeks, they changed their business model to 100% e-commerce and seafarers found their way to e-commerce surprisingly easily. With the changed business model and extensive digital evolution, Sunny’s customers’ expectations and needs changed significantly. 

Streamlining sales and service operations with integrated CRM solution

The solution

As part of their transformation, Sunny decided to implement a CRM system. After an intensive selection process, the choice was made: Salesforce. valantic was recommended as an implementation partner to support Sunny in its digitisation journey. The team helped Sunny co-create a vision and roadmap planning for the implementation of the Salesforce Service Cloud platform. 

The Salesforce platform provides Sunny with the technology for rapid and constant innovation, enabling easy integration into their IT system landscape with omnichannel capabilities. The Salesforce platform is integrated with Sunny’s existing ERP system and eCommerce system. Sunny’s customers’ digital touchpoints have been extended to a true omnichannel approach by using Salesforce Digital Engagement and Marketing Cloud. This means that web, mobile, email, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are part of Sunny’s touchpoints. This is all made possible by leveraging the out-of-the-box functionalities and connectivity tools of the Salesforce platform. This enables valantic to deliver in a matter of weeks rather than months. By bringing together and combining different touchpoints and systems. 

Results

Six months after the Salesforce rollout, more than 40% (on average since the rollout) of all inbound communication was sent via Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, a number that continues to grow. Sunny’s customer service team has already helped more than 4,500 customers through these channels. 

Enabling new inbound service channels was crucial to help customers in a harmonious, transparent and effective way. After enabling Digital Engagement, the amount of inbound communication increased dramatically. Together with Sunny, valantic explored ways in which setting up a Chatbot could increase channel diversion. The result of a thorough analysis of the most common FAQs and questions resulted in a design for a Chatbot, which interacts with CROM’s core platform and keeps the customer updated on their order status, current exchange rate, etc. 

The chatbot will be rolled out through Sunny’s online shop, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. In this way, the team anticipate Sunny’s future growth by increasing agent productivity on the one hand and reducing the average response time for customers on the other. Compared to the rollout date, the waiting time for customers has decreased by about 20%. 

About Sunny

sunny-logo-color

Sunny is the leading maritime retailer in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, selling duty-free products to seafarers. To make things as easy as possible for their customers, they offer a wide range of quality products. Sunny offers its customers clearance services and on-board delivery. Their customer service is ready to handle any query with the warm approach that is so characteristic of Sunny. Moreover, Sunny offers all these services at different ports, so you can choose your own port for delivery. 

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