Global jewelry brand reimagines customer service approach

Replicating the in-store experience
Swarovski is a global retailer specializing in crystal jewelry and watches. Founded in 1895 in Austria, it is still owned and run by the Swarovski family.

“We sell high-quality products, and it’s important our customer service matches the same standards of quality,” says Isabella Kosch, Swarovski’s Head of Service Management Global Business Services.

Buying crystal products like jewelry has traditionally been a tactile experience – customers want to see and feel an item. Swarovski has more than 2,800 stores in 170 countries. It is in these stores that most customers experience the Swarovski brand - the quality, expertise, and service. The business also runs live events, in-store, for Swarovski Club loyalty card members.

Within weeks of the global pandemic, many of the Swarovski stores were forced to close. “Our digital platforms were already in place,” says Kosch, “but we could never have predicted the surge in demand as customers quickly moved online.” For Swarovski, the challenge was not how to maintain revenues, but to deliver the same standards of customer service in an online world.

Creating a link between physical and digital
Swarovski was already prepared. The global business had spent the previous year consolidating regional service desks onto a global platform. This would drive service consistency and provide global oversight of standards.

ServiceNow was part of this transformation. “As luck would have it, we’d implemented ServiceNow Customer Service Management in September 2019,” says Kosch. “What we hadn’t done was utilize the full functionality of the platform.”

ServiceNow Customer Service Management enables Swarovski to be more efficient in the way it manages customer requests, streamlining response times and transforming agent productivity. For advisors, many of whom were required to work from home, it creates a single view of the customer experience. This allows Swarovski to create an end-to-end digital experience – from marketing to sales and fulfillment.

This helps the business create a seamless link between the service in its physical and digital retail environments, Kosch adds: “It brings many different customer touchpoints under one umbrella.”

Consolidating customer engagements
The most immediate impact was to consolidate all communications from one customer into a single case. This helped ensure consistency, avoid duplication, and allow sales advisors to focus on the most urgent requests.

“No matter how the customer contacts us – via phone, email, or chat, we now have one case to work from,” says Kosch. “This creates a single view of the customer’s e-commerce experience.”

Swarovski says this produced an immediate 58% reduction in case workload across the first month, with a long-term drop of 55%. It means service advisors are more productive, and customer service expectations are met faster.

With online sales surging, the most common service contact was customers calling to check when a delivery would arrive. ServiceNow Customer Service Management helped make sense of this deluge.

“We had an incredible number of packages to deliver. The delivery experience is a critical part of the online shopping experience, and ServiceNow meant we could cope,” says Kosch.

More, Swarovski was quickly able to identify and delete redundant service requests. “ServiceNow Customer Service Management enabled us to see which cases had already closed – calls where deliveries had been made. It meant we could close lots of cases at once, cleaning the pipeline and eliminating the backlog.”

Towards a hybrid retail future
Few businesses are making exact predictions about the state of post-COVID retail. Swarovski is already seeing stores bounce back but acknowledges that many customers will have enjoyed engaging online. The future is likely to be increasingly blended.

With that in mind, there will be a renewed focus on enhancing the retail experience across formats. Swarovski has already started to open ‘Instant Wonder’ stores, in 28 global locations, described as a ‘feast for the senses’. These new store concepts are supported by digital activations, allowing virtual tours for customers and previews of new collections.

“We’ve been experimenting with in-store advisors showing a product to customers via video link,” says Kosch. Such engagements will be captured in Customer Service Management.

The engagement goes beyond a short-term fix, Kosch continues: “ServiceNow has become a partner. We’re involved in design reviews, we can provide feedback, and we feel we’re part of the development of the platform. They’re helping us realize the full potential of Customer Service Management, and to create a true ecosystem.” 

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