Nuts.com

The Challenge

Nuts.com sought an easily customizable solution designed to support its people-first approach to customer service by facilitating genuine, personal conversations between its agents and customers, while also improving the operational efficiency of its team.

The Results

• Customizing the platform to route customers based on unique customer needs, automatically deliver proactive support, and provide agents deep customer knowledge on the Kustomer Timeline has enabled Nuts.com to deliver a more personalized customer experience.
• Automating time-consuming, inefficient processes and providing agents all customer data in real-time has led to a 20% decrease in Average Handle Time.
• Resolving customer interactions in a single workspace without having to change systems has decreased agent’s After Call Work by 23%.

 

“We were looking for a customer care platform with the ability to customize and build for the future. What we found in Kustomer was a true partnership and alignment in vision for what the customer experience could and should be.”

Erica Gutierrez, Customer Experience Manager, Nuts.com

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In 1929, Sol Braverman started selling nuts and dried fruits out of a small shop on Mulberry Street in Newark, New Jersey. Ninety years later, the family business is thriving as Nuts.com, a successful online specialty grocery store with over 3,000 different products, including niche products and nostalgic food items that are hard to find anywhere else.

“Food makes people feel good and brings back memories,” said Customer Experience Manager Erica Gutierrez. “We’re the place to service that nostalgia.”

Today, creating meaningful customer relationships is core to the growing success of Nuts.com and a critical differentiator in an increasingly competitive market. Nuts.com has a variety of customers from grandmothers looking for a pound of baking supplies to Breweries sourcing thousands of pounds of a specialty ingredients for their seasonal brew. Gutierrez oversees a team responsible for each of these unique touchpoints. While operational efficiency is a top priority, Gutierrez and the Nuts.com team take a people-first approach to improve the customer experience.

“Our best calls are the longer ones. As a society, we’re no longer used to human-to-human interactions,” said Gutierrez. “When you call us, it might be the most genuine conversation you have all week.”

However, Nuts.com’s previous CX solution didn’t offer the kind of personalization and customization needed to help agents connect with every customer on a personal level. To achieve this unrivaled approach, Nuts.com partnered with Kustomer. This partnership has two main objectives: the ability to customize Nuts.com’s vastly different customer experiences and provide the customer service team with a flexible solution that will support rapid growth.

A Holistic View of Every Customer Ensures a Personalized Experience

Nuts.com understands the value of the person behind every order. Whether a customer has a favorite treat or a specific dietary restriction, Nuts.com wants to know about it before the customer ever connects with a Nuts.com agent, a “Customer Experience Nut.”

 

“When a customer calls, emails, or talks to us on social, it should feel like you’re talking to your favorite cousin — always genuine, awesome and fulfilling,” said Gutierrez.

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Using Kustomer’s Timeline view, Nuts.com can see a detailed profile of every customer’s journey — this includes all customer touchpoints such as emails, social interactions and specific customer notes. This gives Nuts.com agents the real-time customer data they need to not only provide more efficient service, but also deliver better customer experiences that lead to higher repeat business.

Kustomer also gives the Nuts.com team the ability to customize attributes around customers and orders to directly route customers to CX agents who can address their questions with a personal touch. “We can now connect customers with agents who face the same dietary restrictions, building a connection that creates customers for life,” said Gutierrez.

 

 

Automated Workflows and More Proactive, Efficient Service

Every day, the Customer Experience Nuts address a wide range of customer needs and requests, from detailed inquiries about product sourcing and nutritional information to basic questions about order status and delivery. However, their old CX solution didn’t provide the necessary visibility to create effective workflows that address customer needs and requests.

What’s more, Nuts.com had no way to alert customers about order issues or shipment delays proactively. Customer interactions felt more like a transaction than a conversation.

Nuts.com uses Kustomer to automate time-consuming, inefficient workflows to help agents focus more on people than on manual tasks. Now, whenever a customer takes action on Nuts.com or makes a purchase, a custom profile is created that tells the agent everything they need to know about that customer’s order history, shipment status, survey responses, previous customer service interactions, subscription details, and more. As a result, Nuts.com agents are armed with all the context they need to take immediate action, proactively addressing any potential questions or issues.

Gutierrez commented, “We now have a workflow that automatically notifies both customer and agent about a potential shipping delay. All these touchpoints are reflected on the timeline, ensuring consistent messaging is maintained. The entire process is seamless and creates such a positive impact on our customers.”

As a result of the improved workflows and the transparency of all customer information, Customer Experience Nuts are able to resolve customer interactions on a single screen, which has decreased Average Handle Time by 20% and After Call Work by 23%.

Integrations That Make Service Easier for Customers And Agents

Nuts.com was also looking for a truly omnichannel approach to creating better customer experiences. One of the requirements made by Nuts.com’s CTO was that it had to integrate seamlessly with its voice solution, Amazon Connect. This would enable Nuts.com to bring call data and customer data together in a single view, so Customer Experience Nuts could handle incoming calls without ever having to change screens. By enabling faster answer and handle times, voice service levels increased 10% in the first month, which has since risen to nearly 20%.

Kustomer’s omnichannel approach also gives agents the power to fully understand the nature of the inquiry and reply in real time, whether they’re communicating through email, chat, SMS, voice, Facebook Messenger, or Twitter.

“We’ve been able to roll every customer touchpoint into one view,” Gutierrez said. “It’s a huge win not to have three different agents delivering three different responses.”

A Future-Focused Approach to CX

Nuts.com has always found success in putting people first. In partnership with Kustomer, Nuts.com plans to continue optimizing the customer experience by finding ways to connect call data to specific customer profiles. From there, they aim to directly connect customers to agents best suited to address their needs.

“Forget the efficiency of saving five seconds in every customer interaction,” said Gutierrez. “This sets a new benchmark for CX success.”

Beyond that, Nuts.com sees a lot of opportunities to drive proactive engagement and customer retention through better utilization of CRM and customer data.

“I think there’s a lot of alignment between the way Nuts.com and Kustomer look at the customer experience,” said Gutierrez. “At the end of the day, we feel like a partner and not just part of the book of business.”