Case Study: Supermarket Chain Deals With Huge Surge in Customer Demand

This case study investigates how Shufersal, Israel’s largest supermarket chain, successfully transformed its customer service strategy to deal with a huge surge in customer demand.

2020 was a very challenging year. Shufersal faced a significant increase in the demand for their services, especially over digital channels.

There were numerous factors that account for this uptake in demand. One such example is that people were not travelling abroad and were instead in the country during the whole year.

Fortunately, Shufersal led the grocery online market in Israel many years prior to 2020 and were in a good starting position for dealing with the crisis.

With that being said, Shufersal still faced many other concerns, including:

• Protecting the safety of customers and employees during the pandemic
• Expanding their services to meet new demand
• Being able to provide service to every customer who needed it
• Providing service of a reasonable quality

So the supermarket chain acted early, investing in online infrastructures – especially in technology, logistics and customer service – enabling rapid growth in 2020.

To preserve customer relations and care, Shufersal also:

• Hired many new service agents
• Added new service channels, including a self-service application and chatbot
• Expanded service hours, including on Saturday nights (a time they had never before worked)
• Used the KMS knowledge management system to create one database for agents, enabling them provide more professional answers

On this final point, another great benefit of the KMS knowledge management system was that it significantly reduced training time for new hires, as they could easily search for answers to customer queries. This was important in terms of meeting the surge in demand.

By acting quickly and making all of these changes, Shufersal were able to protect their high standards of customer care, despite their rapid growth.

Doing this was vitally important for the supermarket chain, as they were able to secure customer trust, and Shufersal believe that trust is the most important thing in every relationship, especially in relationships with customers.

Despite the rapid growth, stores haven’t changed much. The basic principles are still the same. Long-distance buying became much more popular and many people who have tried the online channels won’t go back and will continue to buy online.

Thanks to Zvi Baida of Shufersal and KMS Lighthouse for sharing this case study with us.

If you’d like to hear more insights from Zvi, he will be presenting at the upcoming 2021 KM & Automation Summit. Just follow the link to find out more and register. 

For further information about KMS Lighthouse’s contact centre solutions, visit: www.kmslh.com