Boxit4me customers shop the global marketplace without borders with Salesforce

Boxit4me was launched in the United Arab Emirates in 2018 by founders with more than 35 years’ experience in the logistics and technology industries.

It helps customers to access the global market by providing each customer a dedicated address in key locations around the world (currently 17 locations), such as the USA, UK, Europe, UAE, KSA, India, Hong Kong, and China to name a few.

Registration is easy and free. Customers can then shop online from their favorite stores around the world, and ship their shopping to their dedicated address. Boxit4me provides free storage so customers can receive more than one package, consolidate them in one box, and then place one delivery order, resulting in substantial reduction on shipping and delivery fees in comparison with shipping each package on its own.

The company also offers a concierge service called Buy4me to place orders on behalf of the customer if the seller does not accept international credit cards.

“Unlike other cross-border delivery companies, customers have full control over their shipments and can track their packages every step of the way using our website or mobile app in both English and Arabic languages,” explained Abou Rahal. “To achieve that, our operations and call center team needed to unlock 360-degree, real time visibility of the journey from when we receive packages in any of our warehouses, to when the customer places an order, all the way until it is delivered to their doorstep.”

Boxit4me currently offers two types of membership: free or premium account. While both customers can expect a seamless and personalised customer journey, the team needed to be able to differentiate the premium experience with some additional touches.

Founders understood that unparalleled customer service is key to success in the industry, and moving individual packages across the globe can be challenging, especially if things are not well organized and trackable in real time. To achieve that from day one, having the right, central platform to connect touch points across the organization and empower the team to give outstanding levels of customer support was not something to compromise on. That is why choosing Salesforce was a no brainer.

Abou Rahal, a digital transformation expert, who has previously worked for Salesforce implementation partners, and had successfully implemented Salesforce to key companies and call centers in the GCC region, was the perfect addition to bring the company’s vision to life. Using his knowledge and expertise, he implemented a CRM with a warehouse management platform built on Salesforce, alongside Service Cloud in the call center, a what turned out to be a successful MPV (Minimum Viable Product).

“As we are not a typical logistics/shipping company, you can’t buy an off the shelf solution for what we needed to achieve, and a custom development from scratch would have limited innovation in the future, not to mention the future high maintenance costs. Salesforce was the best solution to scale and future-proof our growing business and comes with great new features such as Einstein artificial intelligence and data security capabilities,” he commented.

The platform integrates seamlessly with third-party systems via APIs to break down silos and leverages data analytics, AI, and automation to deliver unrivalled levels of visibility and efficiency across the entire business.

Boxit4me generates leads using digital marketing, social media influencers, partnerships, and word-of-mouth recommendations from customers. If a new customer signs up with a promotional code, this is linked to their account in Salesforce so the team can see which activities are generating the most new leads and leverage marketing accordingly.

The customer is then sent on a guided journey after registration to download the mobile app and add their address. “No two journeys are the same – if someone registers but doesn’t place an order, they get an automated reminder email from Salesforce. If another customer has more than 20 packages at one hub, our team gets an alert to reach out and ask if they want them shipped,” explained Abou Rahal “this was easily achieved using Salesforce’s out of the box tools such as workflows rules, process builder, notifications, journey… ” added Abou Rahal.

Data is captured in Salesforce at every touchpoint to help send more personalised communications at the next step, and to keep things simple for the customer, if the team want to update information on the mobile app or website – which are available in both English and Arabic – they can simply make changes in the backend of Salesforce and changes get automatically updated for users without the need for a whole new release.

With 17 global operations across multiple time zones – and more being added all the time – Boxit4me needed to rapidly replace the traditional support emails with a smarter system. “Managing customer requests and coordinating across all operations by email was chaos, we used to have hundreds open cases and emails going back and forth, which caused an average resolution time of a few weeks; in other words: more effort, more cost, and bad customer experience,” added Abou Rahal.

Using Service Cloud the right way, the support team now has better visibility and control, with smoother communication exchange on a single platform. The company now has an average of 60 open cases at any one time with less than two hours average response time. The team can easily identify and close duplicate cases to keep numbers down, and give priority support to premium members.

From a central console, the team has full visibility of the customer history, their preferences, packages, orders, and all open cases. They can see when a record was last modified, which cases are being handled, and can drill down into any metric to unlock richer insights about a customer or delivery.

Managers and team leaders have live dashboards across each department where they can monitor all aspects of the operations, and interneed in a proactive way.

Premium customers receive photographs of their packages when they reach a hub, and are directly alerted if any shipment was damaged. Using customized Visualforce pages to display all packages received and their pictures, operation team leaders can simply scroll through all daily received packages in few minutes for quality control.

“Salesforce allows us to track one person’s package among the thousands of packages we receive each day, and will allow us to locate multiple shipments to group and consolidate in one delivery, which is not easy to achieve with the volume of packages we handle. With real-time visibility of every customer, order, package, and request we are proud to be able to deliver the fastest response times in the industry,” said Abou Rahal.

Customers can open cases using a wide range of channels such as phone, email, and live chat... Service agents have full visibility of the customer’s account, so they don’t need to ask as many or repetitive questions to understand and resolve issues.

Automated emails with a unique Salesforce generated tracking number confirm that the case has been received, so agents are free to focus on having more valuable interactions with customers. If a case needs to be escalated – for example if a refund needs to be authorized – agents can simply tick a box to refer it to a manager who can digitally approve the payment to the customer’s digital wallet then and there, eliminating all the traditional bureaucracy and paperwork.

To maximise efficiency, the team defined SLAs including a first response time of two hours for premium customers and four hours for standard members, with eight hours to close a premium case and 16 for everyone else. Mean-time-to-resolution is down to just 1.5 days, and some cases are even closed within 30 minutes of the customer raising a ticket.

To identify priority cases, agents can see a customer’s lifetime value score at first glance from the dashboard, displayed on a shared TV screen, and premium members are flagged to ensure they get the fastest response.

Responding quickly to customers is helping to build trust and loyalty as the start-up matures. “We know our customers, the industry, and the competition really well. As the company grows, we’re planning on rolling out customer surveys to capture their feedback against every delivery or call so we can always optimize our business in line with their needs and expectations,” explained Abou Rahal.

But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t analysing performance, in fact multiple departments can pull tailored reports to monitor their activities and ensure they’re hitting targets, from CEO and shareholder level, to operations dashboards, finance reports, and insights into where the team needs more support to meet customer expectations.

Getting that senior level buy-in was really important to Abou Rahal to ensure widespread user adoption. As he explained, “In my experience, adoption always needs to start at the top. My team knows I use Salesforce, and my mantra is - if it’s not in Salesforce, it didn't happen! - Salesforce is really easy to use, but people need governance and guidance to streamline change management. What i love about Salesforce is that i can extract any report or build any dashboard to access live data any anytime without being under the mercy of the IT team or legacy Excel files”

To help the team upskill, Boxit4me uses Trailhead for free bite-sized digital training sessions on how to get the most from the platform.

Although Boxit4me is a relatively young company, it’s already on a journey of continuous improvement and innovation. The rapid growth caused by the COVID-19 ecommerce boom highlighted where the company could revamp and optimise processes to become a market leader.

“We’re growing and improving our services every day, and we couldn’t do it without Salesforce,” commented Abou Rahal. “In November 2021 we trained and launched five new hubs in one day, and we’re expanding business to offer a white-label SaaS solution so other companies can use our system to streamline logistics.”

But with all operations centralized on one system, handling multiple business streams is a breeze for this connected, agile, and dynamic company.

“Salesforce gives great ROI – we’ve built a world-class platform that is scalable and low maintenance. Just one person manages the day to day administration activities of Salesforce, and one handles our mobile app. We use Salesforce certified implementation partners when we want to expand our functionalities, and that means we can keep a lean team and really focus on what matters most to us – finding new ways to delight our customers,” confirmed Abou Rahal.