Transforming the customer and employee experience

Heineken, the largest brewer in Europe, operates in 70 countries with more than 250 brands worldwide. For more than 20 years, Heineken has operated in Mexico, where it runs six plants and employs more than 16,000 people.

A constantly evolving company, Heineken Mexico is a market leader with a portfolio of more than 20 products. But its contact center — the preferred touchpoint for most of its customers — relied on a disjointed process to manage 190,000 outbound calls and 40,000 inbound calls each month.

“We have always been focused on achieving continuous improvement, especially when it comes to implementing new technologies and access to the latest innovations,” said Adrián Lozano Cantú, Customer Service Manager at Heineken Mexico. “A modern, flexible all-in-one platform from Genesys was just what we needed. Everything flowed better, and in less time, than we expected.”

Evolving to automation

The journey to a contact center transformation started several years ago — taking Heineken Mexico from a legacy Cisco system to the Genesys PureConnect on-premises application. This was a huge step in the company’s transformation, enabling increased employee productivity, improved CX and enhanced visibility.

While Heineken Mexico had a very positive experience with Genesys PureConnect, the team wanted to leverage the benefits of the cloud. In 2020, it migrated to the Genesys Cloud platform to unify its digital channels — webchat, email, SMS and chatbots. The platform has also allowed them to test voicebot capabilities, where customers can call outside of business hours and interact with a bot. The next day, they receive a callback based on their need and the timeframe that best suits them.

With a clear migration roadmap in place, Heineken Mexico worked with partner Sixbell to ensure a smooth and efficient transition to Genesys Cloud. Building on the success of the implementation, Heineken Mexico was able to further enhance its customer experience.

“We knew it was time to migrate to a Genesys Cloud solution that would transform the contact center by delivering the innovation and automating business processes that our company needed,” said Lozano Cantú. “Now, we have a robust platform with all the features to empower our agents with a superior user experience. And it’s taken our customer service to another level.”

Enabling 360-degree visibility and remote work

Heineken Mexico has leveraged the open, flexible architecture of Genesys Cloud to provide 360-degree visibility for its agents. The platform also enabled agents and their supervisors to work remotely, an option that was critical when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

The new service model included redesigning the user experience for its employees. Previously, the company relied on manual processes to make sales and attend to customer orders. Agents spent time searching for customer information on multiple screens, but now they have a single view on portable tablets. This saves time, allows them to quickly resolve issues and questions as they arise and lets them personalize their service. And the Genesys solution enabled the rapid implementation of remote work with easy onboarding that supervisors could facilitate virtually.

“It was very important that the Genesys solution allowed us to efficiently enable employees and supervisors to work remotely — providing all the required functionalities as if they were on site,” said Edgar Muñoz Hernández, Head of Analytics and Support for Heineken Mexico. “This was very valuable to us at that time when everyone had to go home to work.”

Modernizing a contact center

Heineken Mexico knew the migration to the Genesys Cloud platform included redesigning the contact center with a cloud-based customer service model. Its contact center receives sales requests, tracks product deliveries and ensures efficient ticket resolution in after-sales services. Now, agents can design, monitor and fine-tune the entire customer journey — achieving more personalized customer service. Similarly, it has enabled new self-service digital webchat channels, which has raised its customer satisfaction to 92%.

“With the Genesys Cloud solution, we redesigned the entire contact center, from the agent experience to the customer experience, incorporating new functionalities to route, measure and expand these new digital channels as customer preferences change,” said Lozano Cantú. “Also, we enabled new tools so that customers can resolve requests quickly themselves, without having to wait.”

“Service levels improved markedly, from 95 percent to 99 percent, while maintaining an average handle time of less than 20 seconds,” added Muñoz Hernández. “We have also done very well on the commercial side. Sales have almost doubled, from 6 percent to 12 percent.”

The modernization of the contact center also included remote training for employees using the Genesys Cloud platform. In addition to an optimal home-office implementation, Heineken Mexico improved employee satisfaction levels by two percentage points in the latest internal surveys that monitor the work environment.

Enabling new services

With the migration, Heineken México was able to take advantage of new functionalities such as webchat, and sales campaigns by SMS and by email. “The SMS campaigns especially helped us increase our levels of contact with customers by up to five points,” said Muñoz Hernández. “Now, we send notifications prior to the day they make their order so they can be ready.”

Recently, Heineken implemented new services based on artificial intelligence (AI) with Genesys AppFoundry^® Marketplace partner Tethr It Now — a real-time, video-calling platform that connects experts with users to troubleshoot technical problems. This tool enables video calling with augmented reality capabilities — facilitating remote pre-diagnostic and technical advice related to common failures of customers’ refrigeration equipment. Now, agents can use pointers, colors and underlining to provide remote technical advice to customers. This results in significant cost savings and avoids having to hire specialized outside technicians for in-person customer visits.

“Customer perception of our service has increased by 1.5 percent, and we have also done very well in point-of sale brand preference surveys in comparison with our competitors,” said Muñoz Hernández. “So far this year we have climbed from fourth to second place in a very short time.”

A promising future in sight

Heineken Mexico has kept technological innovation in its sights, with the goal of exploiting the full range of possibilities offered by the Genesys Cloud solution. It soon plans to add workforce engagement management, speech analytics and WhatsApp as an additional customer service channel. And it wants to add Google Cloud Dialogflow functionality, while exploring new ways to leverage other AI options, chatbots and co-browsing tools.

“We will definitely continue to take advantage of the full range of tools and possibilities that the Genesys Cloud solution offers us,” concluded Muñoz Hernández.