Founded in 1853, clothing company Levi Strauss & Co. gained fame for their Levi’s® denim jeans. Over 150 years later, Levi’s is a globally-recognized brand that sells jeans and other apparel in more than 3,100 retail stores across 110 countries.

The summary

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Levi’s saw that their shoppers were investing more time in pre-purchase research. They realized that being able to provide customers with information around the clock in an easily accessible way could greatly improve interest, engagement, and eventually purchase behavior. In June 2020, Levi’s partnered with customer experience automation provider Linc Global to integrate Google’s Business Messages into Levi’s customer experience (CX) strategy and cross-channel chat experiences. Business Messages soon brought in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores of over 85 percent, and drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s onsite web chat. In addition, most Business Messages conversations occurred outside store hours, allowing Levi’s to respond to inquiries more quickly.

The challenge

Levi’s knows customers want to drive these interactions on their own terms and timelines— and on their own preferred communications channel. With store hours often impacted by the pandemic, the company needed 24/7 service to answer the 30% increase in off-hours shoppers. Google’s Business Messages allowed customers to connect with Levi’s without visiting the website, going to a store or making a phone call. Anisa Kumar, VP Global DTC says, “Rolling out CX automation on web chat provided a new way for customers to find answers to their pre purchase and other questions that regularly resulted in a call to customer service. Launching with Google’s Business Messages was the logical next step in providing our customers with a best-in-class customer experience.”

The approach

Levi’s worked with Linc Global, a CX automation platform, to set up Google’s Business Messages on Google Maps for five, then 50, stores, before expanding to more than 200 stores. “Customers can message us through Google Maps even after stores are closed. They can search for products and see product information and availability at their local store, plus get details about hours and COVID-19 related updates to make shopping easier,” said Kumar. The company then added Business Messages on Google Search for a rich messaging experience that synchronized with their regular webchat channel. “Consumers can have their entire messaging experience be on Google—and then visit our website or a physical store to complete a purchase recommended to them in Business Messages,” says Rico Arrastia, VP Product & Experience at Levi Strauss & Co.

The results

Two months after launching Google’s Business Messages, Levi’s CSAT scores for the channel surpassed 85%. And four months after launch, Levi’s found that this new channel drove 30x more store-related questions than web chat.

Additionally, Levi’s noted that 31% of Business Messages conversations were product-related, indicating that shoppers preferred targeted engagement to unstructured browsing. For Levi’s, Business Messages helps cross-sell or suggest products to customers based on an individual’s past purchases, personal information, and behaviors.

Levi’s is now a big proponent of Business Messages as a way to meaningfully engage with customers and stand out from other brands. Arrastia shares, “Business Messages not only creates a stronger customer experience but also enables us to do a much better job at ‘hearing’ shoppers.”

Businesses of all sizes use G Suite to breakdown information barriers and increase employee collaboration. It’s been especially helpful for start-ups and for those who run their own businesses, where juggling multiple jobs—from operations to administration to accounting—is second nature.

For many of these businesses, G Suite helps them collaborate securely and free up time so that they can focus on what really matters: their customers. Below are how three businesses use G Suite to both scale and mobilize while keeping their customers top of mind.

MobileOne Keeps its Employees Mobile

Workers spend up to 8 hours per week searching for, or consolidating, information. When you sift through emails to find files or dig through folders to attach documents, that time adds up.

MobileOne experienced this firsthand.

The company, which operates more than 125 T-Mobile premium retail stores in the US, found that its employees were sinking unnecessary time in email going back-and-forth searching for files.

Its previous productivity tools made it difficult to collaborate, especially for remote employees, and tough to share the latest information, like growth and performance metrics, at an accelerated pace. With this in mind, MobileOne moved to G Suite.

Revel Stark, MobileOne’s Director of Recruiting and Marketing, was heading to the beach with his family one Sunday when his colleague sent an urgent request for a document from him. It took just seconds to access the requested document in the Google Drive mobile app and share it, rather than having to search through files on a laptop, or wait until Monday when he was back in the office.

In addition, real-time editing in Docs and Sheets allows MobileOne employees to streamline how they share and edit documents since it eliminates version control. The company now creates central repositories of information in Docs and Sheets, ensuring everyone is working with the most up-to-date information, saved securely in the cloud.

JBGoodwin Realtors Streamlines Business Processes to Create New Home Owners

As a real-estate company with multiple offices in Texas and clients across the country, JBGoodwin Realtors needed a secure productivity solution that powered real-time employee collaboration.

But it also looked to a solution to help reduce costly maintenance, archive information securely in the cloud, and open up opportunities to streamline business processes. The company turned to G Suite to help.

By moving to G Suite, JBGoodwin Realtors adopted a cloud-first strategy that improved its data security by catching phishing attempts before they reached employees, and as a result, helped reduce time spent on platform maintenance by 30 percent.

Because Gmail allows users to easily archive emails in the cloud, the company no longer needs to invest in hard drive space to save messages. Its employees can easily access emails securely on any device both online or offline. Plus, the company can rest assured that their information stays secure with the help of built-in phishing protections.

Finally, via resources in the G Suite Marketplace, JBGoodwin Realtors automated its manual processes by connecting G Suite data with its CRM and marketing tools, so that its realtors can focus on making valuable connections with potential clients instead of inputting data in multiple systems.

TrueCar Drove a Smooth Transition to G Suite 

More than 1.5 billion people use Gmail everyday. Since employees are often already comfortable with using Gmail in their personal lives, transitioning to using it at work is a smooth process.

This was crucial for TrueCar, an automotive resale marketplace that connects sellers with potential buyers (and arms them with pricing information). Minimal onboarding support and training was needed when implementing G Suite.

The team took advantage of G Suite’s User Interface customizations, which can be tailored to a user’s preference in Settings. For example, at TrueCar, admins customized their Calendar interface to be a side-by-side calendar view so they could easily see multiple schedules on a single screen.

With G Suite, there are many ways to customize your apps to help you stay productive.

Buffalo Tours serves tons of passengers each month, helping them with various aspects of their travel. These involve tour booking requests from passengers, request processing and information checking. Prior to the Google implementation, Buffalo Tour’s email exchange was supported by another email server. Employees lamented the frequent loss of emails and the ineffective spam filtering system, which resulted in legitimate emails from customers being treated as junk mail. Prior to adopting Gmail, the trend of lost emails or failed delivery accounted for 5% of the business. This means that five out of every 100 incoming requests to Buffalo Tours were lost.

“We are in the business of servicing customers and when missing emails become a regularity, it damages our company’s credibility and image, not to mention a loss of company revenue. Internal communication with the various representative offices is mostly conducted online, and lost emails inhibits workplace collaboration,” said Bui Anh Tuan, IT manager of Buffalo Tours.

Managing the email server was also a challenge as the server was hosted by a network operator but located on-premise. Due to the logistical challenges, each time the server failed, it took some time before the server could be rebooted. The complex system configuration also meant it was not easy to get new employees on board.

Gmail emerged as a viable option to replace Buffalo Tour’s existing email server as it was cloud-based and user-friendly. At the start, Buffalo Tours made use of the free Gmail service for business. Happy with the results, Buffalo Tours decided to switch to G Suite on a permanent basis.

“G Suite has enabled us to manage our emails in a more professional manner. This means improved work efficiency and better customer service. Furthermore, it also offers many other essential services that benefit the work that we do,” said Tuan.

Many employees at Buffalo Tours have been utilizing Gmail as their main communication tool. Buffalo Tours is looking at ways to further utilize the other products within G Suite such as Google Sites, Google Docs, and Google Drive.

Since making the switch to Gmail, the company does not have to bear the cost of buying and maintaining a physical server, resulting in cost savings of around 17% annually. The rate of lost emails is now down to almost zero, which is the icing on the cake for Buffalo Tours.

One of the distinct advantages of Gmail is its impressive spam filter capabilities. For the premium version, this service is enhanced with Blacklist and Whitelist features, making the spam filter even more effective. With the enhanced control features, business and junk mail are easily categorised.

“Our staff can easily input the IDs of the entire office and regular customers to the Whitelist. With a click of a mouse, important business emails are never missed. There is a 10-15% increase in employee productivity now that the issue of lost emails is resolved,” Tuan commented. Gmail has also brought about increased convenience to Buffalo Tours. G Suite is easy to configure for any new employee. All employees need is their username, password and an Internet connection to check emails. What used to take a lot of time and resources is now a simple administration process.

With the current blooming mobility trend, Gmail provides Buffalo Tours with the flexibility to empower employees to work more efficiently. Employees can now access their work emails on their personal smartphones, tablets or other mobile devices. “Since we switched to G Suite, there have been zero customer complaints around the inability to contact the sales division. Meanwhile, our business continues to prosper and our yearly bookings increased by 1.5%. Together with Google, we are confident of our continued growth,” concluded Tuan.

The pandemic continues to deeply affect our lives around the globe. In some places, new cases are surging and returning to work is the last thing on people’s minds. In other areas, conditions are improving and companies are starting to think about transitioning their workforce back to the office. 

Exactly when and how to do this remains complex and varies by country, industry, and company.  What’s certain is that hybrid work will become an essential part of the business world moving forward. And finding solutions that bridge the gap between “in-person” and “somewhere else” are crucial.  

At Google, we’ve been focused on what the hybrid transformation means for us. To prepare for hybrid work, using modern solutions is a key enabler.

Chrome OS: Supporting Google’s return to office strategy 

At Google, we’ll move to a hybrid work week where most Googlers spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best. It’s no surprise that as the modern, secure, cloud-first platform, Chrome OS is playing a key role in our transition to a hybrid work model. Because Chrome OS devices can easily be shared, more flexible working models and spaces are now possible. And with user profiles stored in the cloud and collaboration solutions like Google Workspace, employees can log in to any Chrome OS device, access what they need and pick up where they left off.

Here are just a few ways we are using Chrome OS and its tools to support the return to the office:

• In select office locations, Googlers can reserve desks through an internal booking tool set up with a high-performance Chromebox, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Employees can log in to the Chromebox which syncs their cloud profile, and start working with the same environment they have on all their Chrome OS devices.
• We’re announcing new docking stations that are designed for Chrome OS devices and allow employees to bring in their Chromebook from home, connect to the dock with one USB-C cable, and use a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for a full desktop experience. 
• Every Chrome OS device enables a zero-trust security working model with BeyondCorp Enterprise providing our workforce with simple and secure access to applications while providing additional security controls for IT.
• We’ve deployed the new Chrome OS Readiness Tool to our extended workforce to identify employees that are able to switch to Chrome OS. This allows us to expand the latest security, deployment, and manageability benefits to more of the workforce.

Additional ways Chrome OS is helping organizations with return to office

We aren’t the only ones supporting our return to office and hybrid work strategy with Chrome OS. We’ve heard more ways our customers are using Chrome OS to make the transition as smooth as possible. These include:

• Streamlining deployment and management of Chrome OS devices using zero-touch enrollment which allows devices to automatically enroll into a corporate domain without IT configuration.
  Grab & Go Chromebooks being used for frontline and hybrid information workers, allowing employees to grab a Chromebook from a cart and get to work right away.
• Parallels Desktop for Chrome OS being deployed to allow employees to access Windows or legacy apps locally on their Chrome OS devices.
• Existing Windows and Mac devices being modernized and repurposed to run a Chrome OS experience using CloudReady. (Google is currently offering a CloudReady promotion. Learn more here.)

While the Chrome OS team has been working towards making remote working as seamless as possible for IT, we’ve also made advancements in supporting traditional technology that’s required in the office.

• In October, we announced Chrome Enterprise Recommended: a collection of identity, printing, productivity, communications, and virtualization solutions that are verified to run great on Chrome OS.
• With the increased usage of video conferencing on Chrome OS devices, we’ve made improvements to Google Meet and Zoom performance including camera and video improvements to reduce any unnecessary processing and features that intelligently adapt to your device, your network, and what you are working on.
• For improved access to Windows and legacy apps, VMware Horizon introduced multi-monitor support and USB redirection and Citrix Workspace released a tech preview with webcam enhancements and Microsoft Teams optimizations. 
• We integrated with the Okta Workflows platform, so IT administrators can include Chrome OS in it’s access logic and deploy quickly without code. Recently, we’ve added the ability to require users to reauthenticate on their Chrome OS device once Okta has detected that the user has changed their password. Try out this new capability by signing up for our Trusted Tester program.
• We’ve increased our support for direct IP printing with additional printer models since the beginning of 2020. In addition, we have made improvements to management features, including support for multiple print servers and launched policy APIs to provide a better IT admin experience. 

Join us for a digital event with Modern Computing Alliance and its newest member HP 

Last year we announced the launch of the Modern Computing Alliance—a collaboration of industry leaders including Box, Chrome Enterprise, Citrix, Dell, Google Workspace, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware, and Zoom aim to create the pioneering solutions that businesses need. We are thrilled to introduce HP, who brings their innovative hardware and enterprise hardware expertise to the Modern Computing Alliance and has been working closely with the alliance to ensure true silicon-to-cloud innovation.

As an alliance, we’ve been deeply engaged in the hybrid work shift. We invite you to join us for a digital event where we discuss questions about returning to work. Like how product design can encourage participation and collaboration regardless of where employees are, important security issues to keep in mind, and what factors businesses should consider to support a safe, working environment.

Home. Heading back. Hybrid.
Hear from the experts on hybrid work and return to office.
Date: May 20th, 2021

Register here. 

If you are ready to try Chrome OS today, it’s easy to get started. You can contact us to get connected to a partner, sign up for a free 30-day trial of Chrome Enterprise Upgrade to start managing Chrome OS devices, or deploy the Chrome OS Readiness Tool to identify employees that are ready to switch to Chrome OS.POSTED IN:

• CHROME ENTERPRISE
• PRODUCTIVITY & COLLABORATION
• RETURN TO OFFICE