Customer Story - Winparts

Organic Growth

Founded in 1986 as a small trade business in second-hand BMW parts, Winparts has literally outgrown itself by evolving along with the market, starting to deliver for all brands, and pioneering online. "They were the first to start trading car parts online on this scale," explains Marco Jacobs, team manager of customer contact at Winparts.

"The fact that they were the first gave them a head start, but you can only maintain this with active and good customer contact. Partly because of such personal contact and the excellent service Winparts is known for, we have been able to keep growing."

Customizing Communication for International Customers

This growth is accelerating, and Winparts has experienced an immense boost, particularly in the last two years. The customer service grew to 35 people. Because of the international character of the company, two French and two Swedish-speaking employees are deployed in addition to bilingual employees - who serve the majority of the seven countries where Winparts operates.

"Native speakers, because obviously, we want to do this right. You notice that customers from different countries also seek contact in different ways. In some countries you see more emailing, others calling, while the chat as we have implemented is also widely embraced. It's great to be able to serve all those countries from one dashboard in their preferred way thanks to Mobile Service Cloud from CM.com." 

Chatting With ‘The Front Desk'

Customer contact has been relatively conservative for a long time, focusing on telephony. Jacobs states that the underlying idea was that this was the most 'personal' contact. "But as a company, you have to adapt to your customers and they demand transparency, efficiency, and good accessibility." 

“And it is the addition of chat that allows you to continue to communicate quickly and perhaps even more personal.”

To accentuate this, an avatar has been created of all Winparts' customer service staff. "The customers need to know that there is a real person on the other side of the chat to answer their questions. The avatars look like the employees, but at the same time give them a certain form of anonymity. Customers see the "face" they're talking to, which makes it feel as if they are talking to our company's front desk. Both staff and customers are very satisfied with the way we communicate and work."

Twice the Volume of Customer Contact

Mobile Service Cloud enables Winparts to handle all customer contact from the same Agent Inbox, whether it comes in via phone, email, or chat. "It's a great leap forward for our company, in that it has improved our service tremendously, but also our conversion. We have literally doubled our customer contact in the past six months. The use of live chat has made this growth process flawless. In these six months, we have been able to speak to about 2000 customers via chat alone, and, more importantly, conversions have increased enormously. When we only used phone and email, the conversion rate was about 4 percent. 

"Since chat was introduced, conversation rates have grown to 15 percent"

Smooth Pre-sale Communication Drives Conversion

Winparts customers typically search for specific parts and to be sure they are ordering the right product they contact us for additional information. "Because our customers search so targeted, we hardly have to deal with returns, for example," Jacobs says. " As a result, our customer contact primarily occurs in the pre-sales process, and that's exactly where conversion opportunities lie."

Jacobs explains that one tool they use is the license plate check. "This allows us to immediately check for every part whether it is suitable for the customer's car. Based on that, we can actively make suggestions and increase conversion while talking to the customer. We connect data so that we don't have to type everything in again when customers return. The whole process is running much more smoothly because of the combination of data and the use of Mobile Service Cloud. For ourselves, but most importantly, for our customers."

Future-proof Service

With customer service primarily focused on questions about a specific product (and, at a later stage, updates on the shipping process), Winparts is actively looking at ways to future-proof the service and make it even more customer-friendly, while still maintaining the personal touch. "We know that if we continue to grow, we need to take steps in that area. We are thinking of using a bot for frequently asked questions, or customer service via WhatsApp, so that customers can easily and quickly take a photo and forward it during a conversation. The nice thing is that our employees can also handle this from the Mobile Service Cloud dashboard. It's nice to know that with CM.com we have a reliable partner who thinks along with us. Whatever expansion of communication we ultimately choose, we know for sure that Mobile Service Cloud can handle it."

Customer Appreciation Increased to 9.1

The way we treat customers is measured via a Quality Monitoring Form. Tableau is used for further analysis of the conversations and Winparts has weekly meetings to discuss the performance of the customer service team. "We clearly map out how quickly customers are helped, look at the language used and keep track of the ways in which customer questions are followed up. You can see that since we started using this quality protocol, we have experienced growth. The 'happy ratings' are very positive, with more than 85 percent 'good', and the already high customer appreciation has grown from 8.5 to 9.1."

"By implementing Mobile Service Cloud, we have been able to put our customers even more at the center of the business and that is paying off in a great way."