Customer interaction? - Yes, but please make it sustainable!

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements are posing new challenges for organizations of all sizes across all industries. The strict regulatory requirements on the part of the legislator are transforming sustainability measures from a "nice-to-have" to a "must-have". Customers demand sustainable actions and express a willingness to pay higher prices for sustainable solutions, including service processing.

Sustainability perhaps represents the biggest megatrend of our time and calls for a fundamental transformation of the economy and organizational structures. In this regard, ESG has evolved from a risk and compliance issue to a driver of value generation. If implemented effectively, sustainability creates opportunities for growth, profitability, and increased stakeholder value.

Our solution for this challenge is to use the Salesforce Net Zero Cloud which helps to reinforce sustainable actions, increase awareness of sustainability as a critical issue, and provide transparent monitoring.

The following added values can be created thanks to the Net Zero Cloud:

1. Efficient carbon accounting: Consolidating collected data from other modules into a holistic platform can help businesses track their emissions more accurately and provide precise data analyses for audit reporting.

2. Identification of tangible climate actions: The ability to analyze data in real time allows businesses to take informed steps towards reducing their carbon footprint and improving their sustainability efforts most effectively. Furthermore, progress made towards achieving climate targets can be continuously tracked and optimized by new measures as needed.

3. Creation of new opportunities for generating value: By visualizing and integrating data into a central dashboard, businesses have the potential to optimize their existing business models with a customer-centric and technology-driven strategy. Moreover, the data offers new opportunities for commercialization in external departments such as marketing, sales and customer service. This holistic approach promotes responsible action, which has a positive impact on a company’s reputation among the relevant stakeholders and can potentially result in long-term competitive advantage.

The Use Case:

The sustainability-conscious customer Jennifer is using the app of the household appliance supplier ACME to keep up to date with the status of her household devices.

She is notified via the app that an error message has occurred regarding her washing machine. By logging into her customer portal, she is able to find more information about this error message with the option of using a self-service solution in the form of a chatbot. As she cannot solve the problem herself, she can also request a service appointment in the support section of the customer portal. Here, Jennifer can choose between the regular earliest possible service appointment or a sustainable earliest possible service appointment. The latter approach is based on selecting the service technician who is geographically closest to her for the service appointment. This allows Jennifer to make a sustainable contribution by reducing CO2 emissions of the technician due to the shorter travelling distance.