For Freshpet, the Pet Parents they strive to help are as discerning as any brand’s consumers. After all, they’re not just shopping for products to provide enjoyment or entertainment; they’re looking for reliably healthy food to give their beloved pet. The journey for a Freshpet consumer is about more than simply making a purchase. They’re acting as a caregiver, and the brand they purchase from must be credible, professional, and empathetic to where they’re coming from.
So, when Freshpet’s Consumer Care was looking for a platform to help them communicate with Pet Parents via social media, they needed one that would support their mission: "to improve the lives of dogs and cats through the power of fresh, real food."
Here’s how they teamed up with Emplifi to deliver on that goal.
The challenge
Given the thorough research and consideration their consumers put into each purchase – and the fierce market competition for their business – the Freshpet Consumer Care team knew that clear consumer communication across all channels was a huge priority. They couldn’t afford to lose track of a consumer’s conversation just because they switched from Twitter to Instagram, or try to dictate what channels the consumer could use.
"Making sure that we had the right contact channels opened to meet our Pet Parents in the channel of their choice, and not forcing them down our channels (is a big challenge)," said Lisa Diehl, Director, Consumer Care at Freshpet. "Along with this, reporting the right issues is very important to our organization."
Any consumer issues that they received needed to be easily tracked and understood across the organization. They knew that when Pet Parents have a problem with their pets’ food, that’s much more than an inconvenience. It’s about their pet’s health, and there’s nothing the Freshpet team takes more seriously than the well-being of their consumers’ pets.
In order to provide the standard of service to which they held themselves, Freshpet’s Consumer Care team needed consumer issues to be accessible by every team member and quickly tracked to the consumer from wherever they chose to reach out.
The solution
The Emplifi team gained a deep understanding of Freshpet’s needs and felt like they had the perfect platform to help them move forward and reach their goals. They demonstrated how the Emplifi Service Cloud could capture and track contextual consumer data across every touchpoint Freshpet used – voice, email, chatbots, social posts, SMS messages, and more. Emplifi Knowledge, for example, helps to guide interactions with up-to-the-second consumer information that leads to understanding and empathetic communication with every member of the Freshpet Consumer Care team.
In addition, Emplifi provided added value by continually keeping Freshpet up to date on new technological and industry developments, giving them a competitive edge by keeping them out in front of where social media technology is headed in the Consumer Care space. Emplifi’s consistent feature growth – including Live Agent, SMS, and FAQ bots just in the past year – has helped the Freshpet Consumer Care team continue to meet and exceed consumer expectations for seamless interactions.
The results
Freshpet has seen unmistakable results for their consumer care team as they’ve built their work around the Emplifi platform.
“Opening up our digital channels (Bots, Live Agent) has helped to streamline our processes,” said Diehl. “As our brand continues to grow, more and more consumers prefer to engage in the digital space, versus more traditional channels like phone or email. My teams can handle more contacts, when handling chats versus phones.”
And that’s led to both better consumer support and more efficiency from Freshpet Consumer Care, who has been able to reduce the number of team members they need to do the same amount of work. Individual team members are able to handle several chats at once, and they’re able to see all their social spaces in one platform, making conversations easier to track. That saves them a lot of time and resources that would otherwise be spent jumping from channel to channel.
In addition, their FAQ bot has been another big efficiency gainer, handling many of the basic questions that would otherwise require team members’ time. As a result, Freshpet’s highly skilled Consumer Care team members can devote more of their one-on-one time to delving into more complex issues that have a bigger impact on their consumers’ lives, also keeping those interactions more seamless at the same time.
Ultimately, Freshpet has gotten exactly what it needed out of the Emplifi partnership: an easy-to-use platform that helps them deliver to their consumers the critical help and information they need to take care of the pets they love.
"(Emplifi supports us) every day, in everything that we do," Diehl said. "Our spokes on the wheel are integrated with (Emplifi) Agent, making it easy for our teams to enter the correct data, which in turn helps with accurate reporting. Many critical decisions within our organization are made based on the information collected, and being able to run accurate reporting. The integrated Emplifi tools help us do that easily."
