Not without my CRM

Case study by Dario Waechter

atlantis dx creates integrated communication landscape at Marley Spoon

First-class customer service forms the core of Marley Spoon's business model. In favor of integrated customer communication, the Berlin-based cooking box mail order company has commissioned the IT service provider atlantis media to connect its existing store, telephony, ticket and e-mail solutions to the Sugar CRM system. This has increased the productivity of customer service staff by more than 50 percent.

Marley Spoon, based in Berlin, is an international shipper of cooking boxes. Founded in 2014, the company now employs over 900 people in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia and the USA. As Marley Spoon has always been very customer-oriented in a competitive market, the company relies on a well-functioning customer relationship management (CRM) system. That's why Marley Spoon started looking for a suitable tool shortly after it was founded and found the solution in Sugar CRM.

A central data hub

"When we started out, we were using a store system that we had developed ourselves and used Zendesk to communicate with our customers," recalls Roman Georgi, Global Customer Experience Manager at Marley Spoon. "What was missing was a central CRM system that linked these solutions together." As a start-up, Marley Spoon wanted to use a comparatively inexpensive system that was immediately ready for use and could be adapted and expanded in an agile manner either in-house or by an external service provider. In order for it to function as a central data hub, it had to integrate seamlessly into the existing IT system environment and support two-way data exchange. This was also important in order to be able to map Marley Spoon's subscription-based business model: For customers to be able to vary their cooking boxes individually, it must be possible to exchange data between the systems in real time. "We wanted to be able to view all customer data, individual customer activities and the entire customer history in one central location," says Roman Georgi. In view of the various requirements, Marley Spoon opted for Sugar CRM.

Automating processes

"At the end of 2014, Marley Spoon initially purchased around 50 Sugar licenses from us," adds Dario Waechter, Head of Data & Analytics at atlantis dx. Because Sugar is easy to use and flexibly expandable, Marley Spoon implemented and configured it itself. In 2017, the now established company approached atlantis media again. "We wanted to connect various third-party systems to Sugar and automate a number of workflows," says Roman Georgi. "Due to the complexity of the project, we were happy to be able to draw on atlantis media's expertise." The cooking box distributor wanted to connect its existing babelforce telephony solution with the CRM system so that customer service and sales could provide customers with even more personalized support. The Sugar partner was chosen from the outset for the functional expansion of the CRM system, as atlantis media already knew the set-up and was familiar with the subject matter.

Bidirectional CTI interface

The integration of Sugar and babelforce was primarily about reducing the manual workload for employees. "We make targeted calls to inactive customers to reactivate them," explains Roman Georgi. Previously, agents would manually search for a contact in Sugar, open their profile and view their data. They then documented the phone call in Sugar and recorded the data collected in the customer profile. "All in all, it was a very time-consuming and error-prone process," comments Roman Georgi. In order to automate outbound calls, atlantis media has developed a bidirectional CTI interface (Computer Telephony Integration). "Due to the vast amount of data to be exchanged and consolidated, developing the interface was not easy," says Dario Waechter, who managed the project. "We completely misjudged the effort involved, which led to some complications," adds Roman Georgi. "Looking back, we still learned a lot. These insights are now benefiting us in the further development of Sugar."

Triggering outbound calls automatically

To reactivate customers, the agents make automated outbound calls on a daily basis. The contacts to be called are selected based on specific criteria that the employees can easily query in the CRM. The campaigns created in this way are sent to babelforce via the CTI interface. The telephony solution then automatically triggers the call based on the contact information from the CRM system and assigns it to a free employee. At the same time, the interface opens a window in Sugar in which the customer advisor can view the customer's entire history. At the same time, the call is tracked and automatically added to the corresponding customer profile. If the agent has reached an inactive customer, babelforce registers this action and Sugar automatically removes the name from the list. In the event that a former customer has changed their telephone number and can no longer be reached, the system offers a clever solution: after the fifth unsuccessful call, the CRM tool permanently deletes the contact from the list. At the same time, Sugar sets their status to "lost".

All customer data available across all systems

The CTI interface and numerous processes that atlantis media has automated on the software side in addition to the auto dialer have increased the productivity of Marley Spoon's customer communication team by around 50 percent. The integration of Sugar and Zendesk as a customer support and ticketing system has also increased efficiency. When a new customer creates a profile on marleyspoon.de or an existing customer logs into the backend, for example to update their personal details, this data is automatically transferred from Zendesk to the CRM system. "This means that not only our customer advisors but also our sales staff can be sure that they are always looking after their customers on the basis of up-to-date data," says Roman Georgi.

Managing complaints professionally

The cooking box supplier also attaches great importance to first-class customer service in the event of complaints. If a customer has problems with a delivery and sends an email, a corresponding ticket is automatically created in Zendesk. Zendesk and Sugar are also linked to the order management system in order to be able to track whether the customer is right to complain about a missing bell pepper, for example. "In the CRM tool, we can see exactly who ordered which recipe and when," explains Roman Georgi. "We also know which ingredients belong to an order and whether a complaint is justified." At the same time, every complaint is noted in the CRM customer history: Which order was incorrect? Which ingredient was missing from which recipe? Knowing about complaints is also very important for the agents. "If they reactivate inactive customers, they can refer to previous complaints and point out correspondingly improved processes," says Roman Georgi.

CRM: the heart of the company

The connection of the Gmail email program to the CRM system has also led to a further increase in efficiency. As Gmail and Sugar synchronize in real time, emails sent and received are automatically assigned to a specific customer in Sugar. In general, the cooking box supplier is very satisfied with the service and support provided by atlantis media. The collaboration between Marley Spoon and the Hamburg-based IT service provider has worked perfectly over the years. "When we make changes to the CRM tool, it's not easy to get the timing right," says Dario Waechter from atlantis media. "Because Marley Spoon is also active on the American and Australian markets, someone is always working on the system due to the time difference." Thorough coordination is essential to ensure that data entered by users at the time of the update is not lost. Thanks to the care and professionalism of atlantis media, the IT service provider will continue to expand Sugar in the future. After all, the powerful CRM system is a key success factor for Marley Spoon. "Sugar is the place where we centralize all our customer data," explains Roman Georgi. "The CRM system is the heart of our company. It gives us a 360-degree view of every single customer. Without our CRM, we would not be able to look after our customers as intensively as our business philosophy envisages."