Reece uses Salesforce to Create Customers for Life

More than a hundred years ago, Reece started with one man selling hardware products from the back of his truck. From these humble beginnings, Reece has grown to a truly global business, supporting its trade customers and the essential role they play in the community.

Driven by an ongoing pursuit of innovation and continuous improvement, it aims to be the trades’ most valuable partner, helping them succeed in the digital world. To do this, Reece is laser focused on integrating leading digital technologies into the business which enable it to capture its vast customer insights.

“Reece is a relationship business at heart and everything we do is aimed at delivering on our promise to our customers. In the digital space, the ability to customise that experience takes it to the next level which is why we’re gathering intelligence and acting on ways to add value for customers,” said Marcos Kurowski, Chief Technology Officer at Reece.

An important part of Reece’s digital toolbox is Salesforce, connecting customer behaviour with sales and marketing data to support an exceptional in-branch customer experience.

Reece began using Salesforce to gain a complete 360-degree view of customers across multiple customer touchpoints and all business units. Previously, the only view of the customer had been through transactional data.

“Our interactions with the customer are not always about selling,” said Morgan Chandler, IT Delivery Lead at Reece. “We wanted a platform that would assist us in capturing the broader touchpoints and help our branches ensure they were talking to customers for the right reasons at the right times.”

Reece selected Salesforce for a number of reasons, including the depth of its “out-of-the-box” capabilities and intuitive user interface, as well as strong mobile capability. Reece also found strong alignment with Salesforce’s company values and customer-centric approach.

Cludo—now part of VISEO—together with the reecetech team implemented a phased rollout of Salesforce, aimed at helping Reece learn how to crawl, walk, and then run with new capabilities. This agile approach resulted in the implementation of Sales Cloud within just six weeks.

“One of the benefits of Salesforce is that it allows us to implement new capabilities incredibly quickly and get them into the hands of users fast,” said Chandler.

“Reecetech is a tech savvy community, with capability in developing customised code that takes our applications to the next level. Combining that with Salesforce, we’ve been able to internally develop our skills and quickly turnaround solutions for our branch network,” said Gabi Currin, Business Systems Product Manager.

One of Reece’s primary values is to Create Customers for Life. The relationship that Reece has with its customers is core to their unique business offering, and this relationship is owned and nurtured by their branches. Reece wanted to start capturing their knowledge of the customer and make life easier for the branches, by surfacing insights to guide their activities and customer conversations.

“Our focus at Reece is on digitising the customer experience, so we can offer the same world-class experience no matter when, where, or how our customers want to do business with us,” said Currin. “The people working in our branches know our customers and their businesses so well already. They know their families, their favourite footy teams, and even the names of their dogs. What we’ve been able to do with Salesforce is centralise key information, so whether a customer visits a branch in Geelong or Footscray, managers and consultants have information at their fingertips to provide a personalised experience.”

Kirsty Van Leuverden, Marketing Automation and CRM Specialist at Reece, added that Sales Cloud also helped to alleviate some of the pressures on branch staff. “Branch staff are very time poor and have a lot to do in a short amount of time. Salesforce helps them focus on what’s most important with things like recommendations through Next Best Action,” said Van Leuverden.

Reece has developed new products and services to support customers, giving them more time on the tools and helping them run their businesses successfully. Using Salesforce, branch staff can now easily identify which customers may benefit from using some of reecetech’s products and services, such as the maX digital business management app. Developed in-house by reecetech, maX allows customers to access price lists, place orders and integrate with accounting software, enabling customers to fully digitise their businesses.

Earlier this year, Reece launched a new customer onboarding journey, that replaced a single welcome email with a series of communications educating customers about the products and services they can access within their local branch and online using the maX app. Utilising both Marketing Cloud journeys and customer development conversations in Salesforce, Reece staff are able to monitor the customer journey, from initial sign-up, to first use, right through to helping them set up integrations with accounting software, contributing to a 53% increase in online sales and 11% growth in new accounts.

“Salesforce really helps us to align our approach and focuses us on how we can help customers succeed. It’s also increased transparency throughout the business, which is the foundation to creating customers for life,'' said Van Leuverden.

Reece has extended its use of Salesforce over the years to provide a more unified customer experience across sales, service, and marketing. Service Cloud replaced an ageing support system and equipped Reece’s Customer Care team to work more efficiently. Reece also deployed Field Service Lightning which allows Reece and its field service partners to share information and collaboratively solve customer warranty issues.

“Our new aftersales system has improved our processes enormously. We can send automated case updates to customers and suppliers. The proactive notifications have helped to reduce the number of calls to the Customer Care team by 20% and make for a better customer experience,” said Liesl Schwendrat, Customer Care Lead.  “Everyone is kept in the loop with the updates and the ability to attach photos really helps the Customer Care team to troubleshoot issues and manage calls effectively.”

In addition, Reece is using Marketing Cloud and over the last two years it has been on a journey aimed at developing world-leading, seamless marketing campaigns, based on customers’ touchpoints.  Through these campaigns, the business wants to deliver personalised and targeted communications, sending the right message, at the right time, to the right channel.

“We carefully curate the key messages we’re sending out, monitor how often we’re sending them, and focus on the products and information we now know customers are interested in, rather than just what we think they’re interested in,” said Van Leuverden. “We’re also optimising our campaigns through A/B Testing to ensure we’re engaging our customers to increase our eDM performance metrics.

“The ability to personalise our communications at scale is another way that we can enhance the customer’s experience and make it easier for them to do business with us in whatever manner they choose,” said Kurowski.

The reecetech and Digital Marketing teams have a proactive learning culture and have embraced Trailhead to upskill on Salesforce, allowing them to implement new initiatives and capabilities on their own rather than engaging a partner for every initiative. “Trailhead has been really useful for educating us on building automations and journeys, and there are many things I've been able to learn and implement in the same week,” said Van Leuverden.

Throughout the last 18 months, Reece and Salesforce have continued to evolve their strong partnership through monthly governance meetings and personalised experiences, such as “lunch & learns” with product experts to understand upcoming platform capabilities and align them to Reece’s roadmap.