Sonos Transforms Contact Center Using Salesforce and NeuraFlash, Sees 45% Reduction in Monthly Spend

Sound experience company Sonos worked alongside AWS Partner NeuraFlash to implement Salesforce Service Cloud Voice in its contact center within 2 months of project kickoff. Sonos wanted to integrate Amazon Connect with its customer relationship management (CRM) software to improve its customer and service team experience. Salesforce Service Cloud Voice facilitates access to relevant customer data from one place using voice and digital channels. Moreover, the company has streamlined workflows, reduced platform outages, and realized a 45 percent reduction in monthly contact center spend.

Sound experience company Sonos wanted to find a reliable contact center solution that would work alongside its Salesforce CRM software to enhance the customer experience and streamline agent workflows. The company was also interested in using voice-activated, self-service features and near-real-time transcription to recommend actions for customers.

Sonos chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies to reach these goals. To accelerate the project, it turned to AWS Partner NeuraFlash, which recommended Salesforce Service Cloud Voice. This contact center solution is natively integrated with Amazon Connect, a simple-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center. Using Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, Sonos and NeuraFlash brought together voice conversations, digital channels, and CRM data for Sonos in just 2 months. With an improved contact center experience, Sonos has streamlined workflows, reduced training time for agents, and saved 45 percent in monthly contact center spend.

Since 2002, Sonos has been designing and manufacturing innovative audio products, including wireless multiroom sound systems and portable speakers. At the start of 2020, Sonos had to shift its focus to an online direct-to-consumer sales approach in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Once this shift took place, its third-party contact center was no longer meeting its needs in terms of reliability and compatibility with existing technologies, including Salesforce Service Cloud. At the time, Sonos was approaching the end of a contract with the third-party contact center, and it had only 9 weeks to implement another option that would allow Sonos to adapt to changing business demands and future growth.

Previously, Sonos had worked alongside AWS Partner NeuraFlash to set up a chatbot for its website. NeuraFlash is a Salesforce Summit Consulting Partner and a certified Amazon Connect Delivery Partner. “Using Salesforce and AWS, we implement, innovate, and build superior customer and agent experiences that create a measurable business impact for our customers,” says T. Brett Chisholm, CEO and Co-Founder of NeuraFlash.

With a strong history of collaborating with NeuraFlash, Sonos trusted the company to recommend a solution that would meet its growing needs and could be delivered on a short timeline. “NeuraFlash had delivered on all of our goals previously,” says Shiloh Jones, Senior Collaboration Engineer at Sonos. “The team was extremely responsive, supportive, and knowledgeable. Under very tight timelines, the NeuraFlash team was able to provide the support and development that we needed to successfully launch a new platform.”

Sonos and NeuraFlash kicked off the contact center project, deploying Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect as an add-on feature to the Sonos Service Cloud environment. Its previous contact center solution required agents to manually input notes on customer cases and work across two different systems: telephony and CRM. “The agents had to toggle between screens and put the customer on hold to gather information,” says Chisolm. As call volumes increased, agents handling multiple back-to-back calls wouldn’t have time to input notes or would forget to complete this important step. After implementing Service Cloud Voice, agents have greater visibility into customer data in near real time. “Any time a customer calls, Salesforce Service Cloud Voice displays the full Customer 360 profile based on the caller’s phone number,” says Ryan Nichols, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Contact Center at Salesforce. “This improves agent productivity and facilitates a more personalized customer experience.” Overall, the company has reduced call handle times by 10 percent.

Using Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, Sonos launched self-service features in 10 different languages using near-real-time transcription and created three separate call flows. To set up these features, NeuraFlash performed user-acceptance tests, working with native speakers for each of the 10 languages. With the use of near-real-time transcription, Sonos’s contact center agents can pay full attention to customers instead of taking detailed notes.

After the initial deployment, Sonos and NeuraFlash rolled out Salesforce Service Cloud Voice across three different regions 1 week at a time. In total, the build and launch took less than 2 months to complete. “By working with NeuraFlash, we delivered our new contact center solution ahead of schedule,” says Jones. “It would’ve taken us much longer to complete this project if we had done it in house.” Using Salesforce Service Cloud Voice has accelerated training and onboarding processes for Sonos as well. In just 1 month, Sonos trained over 500 agents across the globe on the new contact center solution.

With a reliable system in place for collecting data, Sonos is looking to implement additional capabilities to help analyze customer sentiment and track trends on customer service requests. For instance, Sonos is exploring the possibility of working alongside NeuraFlash to further enhance the chatbot on its website using Amazon Lex, a fully managed artificial intelligence service with advanced natural language models for building conversational interfaces into applications. Amazon Lex works alongside Amazon Connect, which will give Sonos more data to inform customer service and improve its products. “We like being able to test solutions on AWS,” says Jones. “It’s a big help in innovating and finding ways to enhance the customer’s experience at Sonos.”