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.”

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.

Established companies in any industry, including telecommunications, often take a cautious approach when it comes to adopting new technology. This is true of any technology and especially of tools used across entire organizations and at all levels—like collaboration and communication tools. I joined Optiva Inc. as its Chief Marketing Officer in August 2018, and right off the bat I faced the need for cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools like Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), which was new to me. 

Optiva was in the midst of making an organization-wide change to implement Google Workspace productivity and collaboration tools. Employees at that time—at Optiva and across other organizations I used to work with—primarily collaborated by attaching documents to company emails and meeting their colleagues in office corridors. Meetings were almost always in person or via phone. These processes were inefficient and contributed to version-control confusion and decreased overall productivity. They were also based on our pre-COVID world.

Today, Optiva is a fully remote-first organization, and our employees use all the tools in Google Workspace. Collaboration has increased dramatically, surprising even initial skeptics. Occasionally we still encounter resistance from new employees who are used to a different way of working. This is logical, but more often than not, they thank us later, and many have told me that they see the value for their productivity and the entire organization’s collaboration. 

Google Workspace has become a real advantage, especially for a global company like Optiva with employees across the world and in so many different time zones. Instead of waiting for team members’ availability to review or collaborate on a document, wasting time coordinating who works on the latest version, or who is the “owner” of a deck, employees can open a document, view new changes, and add updates, even when others are working on the same document in parallel.  

Google Workspace promotes business as usual during COVID-19

The combination of Optiva’s remote-first policy and Google Workspace collaboration tools proved a welcome addition during the challenges posed by COVID-19. Optiva was ahead of the curve of remote working policies in the telecommunications industry and in the software industry as a whole, so when the work-at-home orders went into effect in March last year, Optiva’s business charged ahead without missing a beat.

Google Meet has helped us maintain a strong corporate culture during this challenging time. For example, we constantly use video conferencing, which has been a great way to see the entire team and get a real sense for how each employee is doing—professionally as well as personally. Using Google Chat allowed us to keep in touch with everyone across our global teams. It helps us ensure that everyone feels secure and can work during this challenging time. Also, we have continued to create new teams with employees all around the world. If we attempted to onboard or train them using conference calls or emails, the experience wouldn’t be the same. Meet has helped us develop the strongest teams possible, faster, and much more effectively. 

We also use Google Workspace tools to cross-train employees on tasks and processes in departments outside their own. That way, if one of our employees has to be out of the office unexpectedly, the company benefits from full business continuity. To make this possible, various teams and departments documented their specific processes, held training sessions on Meet, and recorded them so any employee could access them on demand.

Many struggled in the early days of the self-quarantine orders, especially when it came to the sudden need to select and deploy new technologies for remote collaboration and, more importantly, to keep supporting their customers. We were fortunate that our business was unphased—and we owe a lot of this success to Google Workspace.