Improving customer experience with Messenger

Their Story

With over 400 stores worldwide, IKEA is passionate about providing customers with a wide-range of well-designed, functional, quality home furnishings. The company prides itself on offering products for every type of living situation at a low price point, making furnishing an office, apartment, or new home accessible for all. One of the largest IKEA franchisors outside of the IKEA Group, Dairy Farm IKEA operates in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Indonesia, where it shares IKEA’s products and passion for providing accessible design and décor to all.

Their Goal

Modernising customer care

IKEA Hong Kong aims to provide excellent customer service built on trust, caring and honesty that helps build long-lasting relationships with customers and create a positive shopping experience. To do this, it is essential to find team members who are passionate about home furnishing and providing top-notch customer service – but in a competitive labor market and with rising labour costs, it is increasingly difficult to secure a large workforce of quality customer service agents. As such, the home furnishings retailer wanted to automate certain aspects of its customer service experience so that agents can focus on troubleshooting complex cases that require a human touch.

Their Solution

Embracing automation

After searching for a partner with a strong background in retail messaging solutions, IKEA Hong Kong chose to work with Set Sail Software on an automated customer care solution that could perform essential tasks faster, more reliably, and more cost-effectively.

Set Sail worked with IKEA Hong Kong for three months to identify top-tier use cases and customise the process. The Messenger-powered automated solution was enabled to search the home furnishing catalogue, recognise uploaded images, and respond to common customer inquiries, including shopping advice and recommendations about products and services.

Once the solution was built, IKEA Hong Kong and Set Sail tested it for another three months before launching the product, which included a simple workflow using keywords, triggers and a series of menus to guide customers through each step of self-service until their inquiry is resolved. For occasions when automation cannot adequately resolve the query, the solution integrates with live chat support software so as to provide frictionless, high-quality customer service that is available 24/7.

Their Success

Improved service

After implementing the Messenger-powered automated experience and promoting its automated care via Messenger Ads, IKEA Hong Kong successfully improved the quality of its customer service, and earned the following results:

• 56% automation in handling enquiries and recommending products
• 300% growth for Messenger as a customer care channel over a two-year period showing preference by customers on using Messenger to connect with IKEA
• 78% increase in agent productivity

“In IKEA, we have a mantra: happy coworkers create happy customers. In the face of ever-increasing customer enquiry volumes, we needed to find a way to automate answering simple queries so that our customer support centre agents can invest more time in handling complex cases that require the human touch. We’re thrilled with the results we’ve seen since working with Set Sail to create a Messenger-powered automated experience, especially regarding efficiency, the reduction of pressure our front line coworkers experience, and overall increase in the level of customer service as a result.”

-Solomon Lau, North Asia Customer Support Centre Manager, IKEA Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

“In order to build Messenger experiences that provide personalised customer service, it is imperative our team understands the customer’s needs and pain points as well as business needs, challenges and goals. In building, testing and implementing a messaging solution for IKEA Hong Kong, we aimed to improve not just its customer care, but the business as a whole.”

-Sunny Wong, Co-founder, Set Sail Software