Watchbox personalizes the retail experience with a true customer 360 in Salesforce

About WatchBox

The world’s leading watch house, WatchBox (www.thewatchbox.com) is home to the greatest collection of luxury watches, all certified authentic and Collector Quality. With offices in the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and Dubai, their selection is ever-changing with thousands of luxury watches available at any given time.

• Industry: Retail, E-commerce
• Salesforce products: Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau CRM
• Customer since: 2021
• Use case: customer 360, single source of truth, customer data attribution

• Industry: Retail, E-commerce
• Salesforce products: Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau CRM
• Customer since: 2021
• Use case: customer 360, single source of truth, customer data attribution

Suboptimal customer experience

WatchBox is a global company with clients throughout the world. Customer experience and relationships are at the core of their business and are particularly important within the luxury watch space. “Our clients and client advisors build lasting relationships”, Ian Swain, Director of Enterprise Products, explains. “Our clients may have an affinity for specific brands or watch styles and understanding that through their previous purchases and interactions allows us to ensure we are providing them the absolute best in recommendations and customer service.”

“ Being able to match those expectations and provide our clients with a consistent experience across their preferred channels is invaluable. It is only possible through accurate real-time data and a strong single source of truth. ”

Ian Swain II Director of Enterprise Products at WatchBox

With different contact channels and means to engage with WatchBox, being able to accurately identify the right client with the right information in real-time is essential. Now that Covid-19 has transformed the world, the expectations of accessibility and service have increased even further. “Being able to match those expectations and provide our clients with a consistent experience across their preferred channels is invaluable. It is only possible through accurate real-time data and a strong single source of truth”, Ian explains.

For WatchBox, Salesforce Sales Cloud is where the single source of truth for one individual customer needs to live. However, legacy data migrations and a myriad of channels feeding data to Salesforce presented data challenges and a loss of the customer 360.

The main lead generation source for WatchBox is their website. “We have contact forms that are used when a potential customer wants to make an offer on a watch. This form creates a new opportunity within Salesforce alongside a new Person Account. Furthermore, Facebook and Google lead forms, inbound phone, texting and different marketing integrations capture data channelled to Salesforce. And finally, we have end-users creating records with a need to validate data in real-time.”

These data challenges had the potential to cause skewed reporting and possible challenges with the customer experience. “WatchBox uses historic customer transactions and other engagement data to curate and personalizes marketing messaging to offer more personalized interactions and foster stronger relationships,” Ian explains. Messaging an existing customer with communication meant for new customers and account ownership issues are examples of this.

End-user empowering prevention

Salesforce standard matching rules weren’t as robust as WatchBox wanted. Their search for a solution that could unify and create a trusted view of the customer in their Salesforce Sales Cloud led WatchBox to Plauti.

“ “The manual prevention functionality has provided the most user value” ”

Ian Swain II Director of Enterprise Products at WatchBox

Their first challenge to overcome was to deal with any existing duplicate data. “We did a handful of initial deduplication projects and consolidation jobs. Because we deal with large amounts of data, we used the processing power of our local machines using DC Local, which expedited the process.” The search results of those jobs were reviewed manually by teams of employees at first, to get the matching and merging settings modelled. “After finding the sweet spot in the configurations, we added automated functionality to this through auto converting and merging. We utilize auto-merging features regularly with cross-system integrations”, Ian Swain explains. This provided immediate value in the first run.

Since then, WatchBox has set up preventative assessments for all data feeding into Salesforce. “We have preventative auto-convert jobs that run daily for leads to Person Accounts with different formulas and weightings.

“However, the manual prevention functionality has provided the most user value”, Ian explains. “We have put that into the standard Salesforce editing functionality so that way our team members know if they type matching customer information. This alone prevents many potential challenges.” In addition to that, they have deduplication functionality on every record page using a lightning component that allows users to see in the blink of an eye if there are any matching leads or Person Accounts.

Business growth

Since implementing the duplicate check functionality, the insight of their customers has dramatically increased due to stronger attribution of historic transactions and behaviors. “After using the duplicate check functionality, we were able to more efficiently attribute and consolidate customer buying behaviors and further strengthen our customer relationships,” Ian explains. Their segmenting has become much stronger which allows WatchBox to offer a truly personalized experience per individual.

“ Since we have been using the duplicate check functionality, we've had business growth month over month. I have no doubt Plauti helped make that possible. It has been invaluable and we're using it more and more. It makes maintaining a single customer view easy. ”

Ian Swain II Director of Enterprise Products at WatchBox

Furthermore, a connected experience has been realized. “Accessibility is paramount to customer service. It is important to us that our clients can engage with their client advisors at the time they need support. This can mean communicating through different channels or even through a different phone number or email - particularly with the abundance of new technology and communication platforms that have launched throughout the past two years. Our clients are now able to do so.”

“Since we have been using the duplicate check functionality, we've had business growth month over month. I have no doubt Plauti helped make that possible. It has been invaluable and we're using it more and more. It makes maintaining a single customer view easy.”

When asked about any next step, Ian Swain says the following: “We're exploring ways to integrate the platform functionality more and more throughout our ecosystem. We're exploring utilizing APIs from MuleSoft, to implement our validation before reaching the Salesforce Org.”

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Any advice for other (online) retailers?

“This platform is great, it has helped WatchBox immensely

I recommend it all the time to other Salesforce users. The free version is excellent, producing a positive impact immediately. With any technology transformation, migrating platforms often can result in duplicate data which has the potential to impact analytics. Incorporating platforms like the one of Plauti during the migration process removes those challenges significantly.”

Any advice for other (online) retailers?

“This platform is great, it has helped WatchBox immensely. I recommend it all the time to other Salesforce users. The free version is excellent, producing a positive impact immediately. With any technology transformation, migrating platforms often can result in duplicate data which has the potential to impact analytics. Incorporating platforms like the one of Plauti during the migration process removes those challenges significantly.”