Halfords: Digital Transformation Journey

Halfords is the UK’s leading retailer of automotive and cycling products. BrightGen has seen Halfords evolve its digital capabilities significantly since partnering in 2015. The company has brought every aspect of its business online, providing superior service to its customers and partners. This timeline celebrates BrightGen’s journey with Halfords, and how the retailer has advanced their capabilities with Salesforce over time.

2015: Halfords’ journey with BrightGen begins!

BrightGen took over as Halfords’ Salesforce partner for service management in 2015.

Cycle2Work Scheme

  • Implemented a new process to reduce time spent on admin work
  • Updated Cycle2Work website to cope with 3rd party outages
  • Made enhancements to website such as store network map and employee calculator
  • Automated Cycle2Work voucher scheme to allow customers to redeem them in store

Radian6 (now Social Cloud) Integration

  • Integrated Radian6 (now Social Cloud) to Salesforce, configuring engagement console and social hub to facilitate social listening
  • Set up automatic case creation from social posts to streamline customer experience

2016: Improving case management and implementing ClickTools

Case Management Process Improvements

  • Enhanced case management process to improve product look up functionality and improve the service user experience, using article code lookup

Survey Solutions

  • Reviewed options for customer feedback solutions, trialling them before determining whether to renew ClickTools, a survey product available on Salesforce AppExchange
  • Implemented ClickTools to enable seamless customer feedback

2017: Workforce management and voucher redemption

Workforce management tool integration

  • Designed and developed integration between Salesforce and workforce management tool, Teleopti
  • Improved monitoring of agent and company performance by extracting email statistics from Salesforce and importing into Teleopti

Redemption of vouchers online

  • Enabled redemption of Cycle2Work vouchers online thereby removing a manual overhead and streamlining the process which in turn drives sales of the B2B scheme

2018: Chatbot implementation and Social Studio integration

Social Studio

  • Integrated Social Studio with social media platforms (e.g. Twitter)
  • Allowed Halfords’ customer service to respond directly to messages on social media and raise a case in Salesforce for the request automatically

Live agent for Autocentres

  • Designed implementation for and deployed Salesforce chatbot, Live Agent
  • Allowed autocentres to handle chat requests from customers via the website
  • Implemented new branding / CSS of Live Agent
  • Reported increase in sales from Live Agent chat functionality

B2B integration

  • Designed and deployed web-based form embedded within the Halfords website
  • Enabled automatic lead creation in Salesforce to facilitate faster sales follow-up, speeding up and securing new business more efficiently

Shield encryption

  • Encrypted data at rest using Salesforce Shield, including migration from older portals to Salesforce Communities, removing part of the legacy technical debt while ensuring data was available to the business as needed

2019: Full Salesforce implementation in Autocentres

Salesforce for Autocentres

  • Introduced Salesforce access in a restricted view for autocentre regional and divisional management
  • Enabled ability to view cases and report on each user’s own region or division

Reputation Studio

  • Installed and deployed Reputation Studio, allowing several sources of ‘review’ information to be automatically imported in Salesforce (e.g. Amazon, Yelp, etc)
  • Centralised reviews into one single point so that the data could be used for reporting purposes and product feedback

2020 onwards: Continuous improvement

  • As close partners, BrightGen and Halfords continued to see progress with wider Salesforce adoption across the business
  • As the Salesforce processes within the Cycle2Work Scheme delivered results, BrightGen partnered with Sharon Bedford to document its success in this summary
  • Halfords featured in BrightGen’s second customer spotlight webinar, clarifying how they had digitally transformed the customer journey, highlighting the importance of the Salesforce Admin role in the process. Watch the webinar below.