With over 100 years of experience, Bush Brothers & Company® processes and markets more than 55 million pounds of beans per year. Family-owned since 1908, BUSH'S® places high value on its history, quality, and service. The company’s consumer relations team handled approximately 30,000 customer calls, letters, and emails manually each year. These interactions varied from recipe requests, ingredients, product issues, location of a product, and more. In 2004, BUSH'S began looking for an automated solution to match its quest for quality and service.
A complete view of the customer through an integrated CRM and omnichannel customer service.
BUSH'S selected Emplifi Agent™ as its first customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage all customer interactions — via phone, email, and mail — from a single, integrated interface. It resulted in improved accuracy of information capture and case history. This unified view of the customer, paired with in-context guidance, empowers the consumer relations team to resolve issues more efficiently while growing customer loyalty from the service experience.
Moreover, as the brand recognized it had a growing social media audience (more than 175,000 on Facebook, 5,000 on Twitter, and 2,000 on Instagram), it decided to add Emplifi's omnichannel customer service solution to capture more significant insights and give agents the ability to engage with consumers where they are — on social media.
Emplifi's technology also includes response generation features that automate goodwill fulfillment via email, social media, and white mail. Team members can now prioritize issues that require human interaction, saving valuable time and allowing them to assist other areas of the company.
"I’ve been pleased with Emplifi’s CRM since the very beginning," said Kenna Hess, Manager of Consumer Relations at Bush Brothers & Company. "We’ve moved from a manual environment where we had to do everything twice — capture the issue first and then run a mail merge for any letters or coupons we needed to send — to an automated, completely integrated platform that has decreased our handling time from three to four days to same-day resolution. Thanks to the response generation functionality, we no longer need to produce and match mailing labels, allowing us to respond to customers more efficiently."
Improved response times generate same-day resolutions
The switch from manual data entry to a CRM system with intelligent data entry features, dynamic field configuration, and intelligent type-down options allow BUSH'S consumer relations agents to efficiently complete case information while focusing on the service experience. These automation tools have enhanced the brand’s response time — improving turnaround time from three to four days to same-day responses. The response generation functionality, time spent on manual issue resolutions, and goodwill fulfillment have been cut in half.
With the added time savings, the Consumer Relations team can now connect their knowledge of the consumers and expand their workload to include tasks like product labeling management assistance, product advertisements and social media content editing, and crisis prevention with the product retrieval team — all without increasing staff size.
Emplifi Agent makes it easier for the consumer affairs team to track and report issues by the customer, product or issue code, and repeater status. It improves the communication among internal teams and with their processing facilities in Wisconsin and Tennessee.
"The time savings allowed us to increase our workload without increasing our staff… now we have the bandwidth to bring the knowledge we have gathered from dealing with our consumers to many other areas of the business," added Hess.
The takeaway
Using Emplifi Agent and Emplifi's omnichannel customer service solution, Bush Brothers & Company achieved faster response times without increasing staff size. Bush Brothers & Company was also able to gather insights from social media monitoring and communicate easier.
Are you interested in a comprehensive CRM system and social media monitoring system that’s easy to integrate? Contact an Emplifi expert today.
