How we Elevated Confused.com's Support with Salesforce & WhatsApp

Confused.com is a leading UK financial services comparison platform. With the customer at their heart, their service is built on providing clear, accessible, and efficient support. They help people make informed financial decisions with a seamless customer experience. To maintain their competitive edge, they wanted to integrate WhatsApp to their customer service channels. They partnered with Solution Junkies to lead the project.

Confused.com's initial goal was simple. They wanted to offer customers more choice with WhatsApp. However, when Solution Junkies began the discovery process, we uncovered several critical issues that would challenge the implementation. 

• Channel Inconsistencies: Integrating WhatsApp with the existing live chat created a risk. The two systems would store data in different ways. This would make having a single view of all customer conversations difficult.
• Data Management: With hundreds of thousands of records, Confused.com faced data quality issues. Duplication, information gaps, and a suboptimal data structures were present. Many records were linked to a single Parent Account, and Person Accounts had not been utilised.
• Storage Constraints: Confused.com had limited Salesforce licenses. They were also operating over storage capacity (109%). This meant data cleansing and management were critical for their long-term system health.
• Aligning with Policy: It was company policy to retain records for extended periods. This added complexity to developing a streamlined data retention and cleanup strategy. 

It became clear that to successfully launch WhatsApp, they needed effective data management as a foundation.

Solution Junkies devised a plan of action to address Confused.com’s challenges. The strategy focused on robust data management, optimised Salesforce objects, streamlined automation, and a seamless WhatsApp integration.

Strategic Data Cleansing

The first step was to clean the data. Historic chat transcripts and related data, were successfully cleaned:

• 51,860 Chat Transcripts
• 240,388 Conversation Context Entries
• 121,265 Live Chat Transcripts
• 51,860 Chat Visitors.

This initiative reduced data consumed by these objects by 50%. As a result, Confused.com regained 8% of total Salesforce org storage.

Implementing Person Accounts

Then, Person Accounts were enabled and set up to create a more customer-centric data model. This involved:

• Converting the case trigger handling contact creation to a Flow that handles Person Account creation.
• Developing a Flow to convert contacts from Live Chat to Person Accounts.
• Creating a Flow to convert historic contacts to Person Accounts.
• Migrating phone number data from cases to contacts to improve WhatsApp matching. This resulted in 35,000 Person Accounts populated with phone numbers.
• 115,000 contacts that were previously distributed across 3 accounts, were converted to Person Accounts.

Seamless WhatsApp Integration

Next, we configured Salesforce Digital Engagement with Enhanced Messaging capabilities.

• Channel Setup: A new WhatsApp channel was created and connected to Confused.com's Meta account.
• Omni-Channel Routing: We implemented an omni-channel routing flow/flow routing with omni-channel for intelligent routing of WhatsApp messages. This includes Person Account linking, case creation, dynamic automated greetings, and capacity controls.
• Automation with Flow: Salesforce Flow was then used to automate message session processes. This included case assignment, post-contact surveys, and maintaining metrics on custom fields.
• Reporting & Monitoring: Custom reports and dashboards were developed to provide visibility into WhatsApp.

This multifaceted approach enhanced Confused.com’s use of Salesforce Service Cloud. Now, they can provide exceptional customer service on users' preferred channels.

• Reduced Storage: Critically, org storage usage was reduced by 8%. This improved performance mitigated the risk of them incurring additional costs.
• Successful WhatsApp Adoption: In the first month after going live, 185 customer conversations were held over WhatsApp, with 139 unique customers. This uptake in customer conversations demonstrated the immediate uptake of the new channel.
• Channel Shift & Increased Capacity: Live Chat case creation decreased 9.5%. Total case creation (across WhatsApp and Live Chat combined) increased 35%. This indicates that Confused.com is now supporting a greater number of customer interactions.
• Positive Customer Feedback: Customer satisfaction improved significantly. Average feedback scores for agent handling, speed, and overall satisfaction rose to 8/10. This was an increase from the previous year’s average of 7.5/10.

By tackling the data challenges as part of the WhatsApp integration, Solution Junkies helped Confused.com expand its service channels and build a more robust and scalable Salesforce foundation for future growth.