Delivering a highly bespoke and personalised service is reliant on rich data. And that means customer records need to be constantly updated and easily shared as relationships evolve. Capturing every interaction is hard enough – but Quintessentially faces an even bigger challenge. To provide bespoke lifestyle management services, it needs visibility of a large volume and variety of customer data – from memorable dates and specific travel requirements to unique preferences and favourite cuisines.

“We need to understand the motivations and changing passions of thousands of members around the world,” said Cathrine Levandowski, Global Head of Operations for Quintessentially. “A customer service platform that can flex to match the unique needs of our business and our members is critical to our success.”

Quintessentially has been using Salesforce Customer 360 for more than 10 years to capture member preferences, requests, and payments across its B2C and B2B concierge business. Thanks to the flexibility of the platform, Quintessentially has been able to establish secure APIs with dozens of corporate partners that offer its concierge services to VIP clients and senior execs. This means it can combine data from its partners’ CRM systems with member records in Salesforce to ensure a seamless service.

Quintessentially has also been able to scale its operations more easily and cost-effectively to support rapid growth. Since it was founded in London in 2000, the group has opened another six hubs in key cities, including New York, Dubai, and Hong Kong and built a network of 30+ partner offices. The US is now its second-largest market. “Our global membership increased by 40% in the year ending April 2022,” said Darren Ellis, Quintessentially’s Group CEO. “With Salesforce, we can onboard new offices and colleagues to respond to increased demand. It makes growth easier and faster.”

Delivering exceptional customer experiences means finding the right balance between quality and efficiency. For Quintessentially, this is particularly challenging. “We don’t want to reduce the volume of cases; we actually want members to engage with us as much as possible. We strive to have as many as 500 interactions with each member per year,” said Lucy Telling, Global Head of Lifestyle Services for Quintessentially.

Quintessentially’s global offices receive around 300,000 member requests per year, which are logged in Service Cloud. Automated workflows help ensure that every request is acknowledged within 30 minutes. With member records updated in real time, lifestyle managers can track the status of every request – some of which can take months to deliver due to their unique and complex nature.

Email exchanges between members and colleagues in Quintessentially’s specialist teams as well interactions with thousands of suppliers are seamlessly added to Service Cloud records using Salesforce Inbox. Integrations with Vonage, a telephony tool from the Salesforce AppExchange, and a WhatsApp solution also enable Quintessentially to automatically record omnichannel interactions.

“Instead of spending time manually entering data, lifestyle managers can focus on supporting our members and enriching their lives,” said Telling. “Capturing data centrally also saves time for our members and enhances the customer experience as we don’t have to keep asking for basic information, such as dietary requirements or other preferences.”

Empowering its people to work faster and smarter contributed to Quintessentially achieving its best EBITDA margin in a decade for the financial year ending April 2022. “We want to double our membership base by 2025,” said Ellis. “Improving efficiency and visibility across the group will help accelerate our growth goals.”

To provide lifestyle managers with richer member insights, Quintessentially is extending Salesforce Customer 360 to the rest of the group. This includes around a dozen specialist divisions and its charitable foundation, which raises millions of pounds every year with support from Quintessentially’s philanthropic members.

“Visibility of every interaction across every business line will make us even more proactive,” said Ellis. For example, lifestyle managers could recommend a skiing holiday in a specific location at a specific time based on a member’s previous bookings or work with colleagues in the education division to make travel arrangements to support university tours. “We’ll be able to share information more easily, which will help increase efficiency and improve the member experience,” said Jess Harris, Head of Education for Quintessentially.

A fashion show in New York. A charity golf tournament in Dubai. A supper club in London. Quintessentially wants to ensure its members, who are all high-net-worth individuals, are aware of the latest luxury events and experiences. But every member has different interests. “With our previous CRM provider, our communications with members were not sophisticated, targeted, or personalised,” said James Wall, Global Marketing Director for Quintessentially. “We needed to get smarter at communicating with members and prospects.”

With support from Salesforce Customer Success Group, Quintessentially deployed Marketing Cloud in March 2022. And it’s helped take member engagement to a new level: the open rate for proactive distributed marketing has increased from 50% to 70% in a matter of months.

Marketing Cloud’s Email Studio is integrated with Service Cloud, which means the marketing team and lifestyle managers can draw on the data captured in members’ profiles to send more targeted messages and prompt more conversations. For example, if a lifestyle manager sees that a member has opened an email about wedding services, they can schedule a follow up call to discuss their plans for the big day.

Quintessentially is also getting more traction with prospects: the open rate for its subscriber newsletter has gone from 30% to 37%, which is well above the industry average. This has been achieved through Marketing Cloud’s ability to personalise, automate, and produce dynamic content that better serves individual members interests and passion points.

The marketing team is also using Journey Builder to create automated journeys for key stages in the member relationship, such as onboarding and renewal. “We can now create dynamic global content centrally while ensuring emails remain relevant for local markets and members,” said Wall. “It helps us achieve more with the same resource.” For example, Quintessentially has consolidated five separate onboarding processes, which used to be managed by three different teams, into a single automated journey.

Taking a centralised approach means Quintessentially can measure marketing results and spot trends on a global basis more efficiently than previously. “We can see which topics and events are most popular and use this intelligence to prioritise our investment in membership services,” added Wall.

Quintessentially has always been committed to making members feel special with its personalised experiences and specialist partnerships. By empowering more teams with smarter workflows and richer insights, Quintessentially can scale its personal approach to reach an even bigger audience. “Our growth strategy is founded on our ability to offer a richly personalised service that benefits the entire Quintessentially community,” said Ellis. “With Salesforce, we can connect more people with the things they love most.”