Gardens Alive grows with Dynamics 365

Supporting its global presence, a central customer contact center in India manages the e-commerce business, while additional offices in Holland manage merchandising. Smaller operations, fulfillment, and marketing offices are located in Canada and Massachusetts. Every Gardens Alive department prides itself on providing high-quality products for their North American customers sourced from partner brands that offer unique and specialized plant varieties from around the world.

Meeting growing needs

Gardens Alive has a variety of challenges due to the nature and complexity of growing, sourcing, and selling live horticulture products. The unique partner preferences and changing business requirements for each sales channel present new tests to business systems daily.

In 2022, to improve efficiency, stay competitive, and serve its customers best, Gardens Alive decided to modernize its business by implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365. The unified system brought its teams together by connecting finance, CRM, and supply chain data. These newly standardized processes and streamlined workflows across workstreams increased efficiency and created a more collaborative workplace.

Dynamics 365 Finance was implemented for its accounting cycle, automation capabilities, and streamlined processes it enables. Better visibility to financial data and automated accounting tasks was a huge time saver for the company’s accounting team and monthly reporting is much simpler.

All this connected, rich data has the potential to provide operations, customer service, and finance managers with real-time information to make smart decisions and confidently forecast business health. Gardens Alive looks forward to taking advantage of all the enhanced features and data analytics capabilities of Dynamics 365 once their connected data is fully leveraged with even more enhanced features at their fingertips.

The path to enhancing customer service

To cultivate further success Gardens Alive needed a full and current view of all its available customer information to allow customer service teams to easily understand and assist customers more efficiently and knowledgably. Dynamics 365 Customer Service, built on the user-friendly platform already familiar to Gardens Alive teams, delivers a heightened level of personal service which elevates customer satisfaction.

In mid-2023 Gardens Alive built on its familiar, centralized, and stable Dynamics 365 platform by replacing Salesforce with Dynamics 365 Customer Service. With the flexibility and seamless integration Dynamics 365 offers, the company could easily use its unified routing functionality with its third-party Bucher & Suter Cisco contact center connector to provide and enhance voice, chat, and email channels. Unified routing first classifies incoming work items from different channels using machine learning models and categorizes the customer need before determining the appropriate workflow. Then it categorizes and prioritizes the nature of the work and the availability of the agent with the right skillset. This automation has helped increase the company’s email processing rate from 9.65 per hour to 10.33— an impressive customer service delivery improvement rate of more than 7%.

With future rollouts scheduled throughout 2024 and 2025, Gardens Alive will continue to connect more customer data and sales channels. Dynamics 365 Customer Service will give agents a more complete view of customer data, enabling them to interact with their customers more personally. 

“Dynamics 365 Customer Service streamlines the customer experience by providing agents with keen insight into each customer's journey, by delivering an efficient and memorable customer interaction,” says Tas Mims, Global Contact Center Manager, Gardens Alive. Equipped with the knowledge they need to quickly address customer concerns, service agents not only deliver just the right information to address specific inquiries but delight their customers with fast resolution.

Gaining a clear view of customer needs

Gardens Alive, together with its global business partners, seeks to deliver an exceptional experience at every touchpoint. Its customers are highly valued, and Gardens Alive knows they rely on the service excellence the company provides. To grow with the industry’s changing needs and continue to serve its customers well, enhancements were on the horizon.

In late 2023, the company rolled out the Digital Messaging Add-in for Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help its customer service teams be more prepared, knowledgeable, and responsive to customers. Dynamics 365 brings together customer contact history, account data, email and chat functionality, and chat transcription with innovative conversation sentiment indicators to measure the satisfaction level of each chat. It also offers relevant support articles housed in SharePoint, so agents can respond to inquiries knowledgably. Having everything in one data-rich screen, without the need to cross-reference multiple sources, is a game-changer and allows agents to provide quick and complete service.

One of the most powerful features of Digital Messaging is the addition of AI-driven chatbots created with Power Virtual Agents. Chatbots provide a responsive self-service channel for customers, using the rich data in Dynamics 365 to respond intelligently and personally to chat-based inquiries. Bot escalation to a live agent is down from 50% to 31%. With continued enhancements the team expects to reach their escalation goal of 20% to 25%. A quick response time is important to Gardens Alive’s customers, and when a live agent is needed, Dynamics 365 Customer Service initiates a call.

Gardens Alive’s customer service solution is powered within the Dynamics 365 ecosystem, connecting workflows, and sharing data so all systems are in sync. This means service agents see the full picture when helping customers and can meet the customer exactly where they are in the sales and service cycle. “With Dynamics 365 we’ve seen huge benefits from having unified customer profiles and leveraging machine learning to really understand our customers better,” says Karla Lawson, Contact Center Coordinator, Gardens Alive.

With the 2023 Dynamics 365 Customer Service go-live, Gardens Alive also rolled out the global address book solution using the Microsoft Power app bi-directional data connector solution, dual-write to ensure all the rich customer account data housed in Dynamics 365 is synchronized and easily accessible to the entire organization. The new central customer hub empowers customer service agents to serve their customers well.

Empowered teams, satisfied customers

“Our customer response times have improved as the agents are empowered with all the information they need to resolve issues faster. Analytics and insights are helping in a big way to enhance the overall quality of customer service,” says Rajiv Kaushik, Solution Architect - Dynamics/Power Platform, Gardens Alive. Gardens Alive provided its teams with the proper tools, functionality, and training to empower them to achieve their full potential and increase productivity.

Service agents manage cases better

Agents manage cases faster and more knowledgably, and automated routing for approvals makes their work easier. They can view approvals, credited accounts, and customer orders in real time. As more customers use the self-service chat experience, wait times are down, and with enhanced email security agents see a 70% reduction in spam emails.

Time-saving features boost productivity

The march toward one central and all-inclusive interface, along with automated tasks and self-service functionality will continue to make daily tasks and inquiry resolution progress faster so that more cases can be resolved in less time.

Automation streamlines financial management

Standardized processes and automated workflows keep financial accounts up to date, make bank reconciliation easier, and quicken the accounting cycle for timelier month-end closing.

Connected data offers deeper insight

Customer satisfaction is enhanced when customer service agents understand the customers’ sales and service journey in one single page view.

Shared data unites teams

Teams armed with complete customer information and integrated collaboration tools work better together, eliminating silos and nurturing a positive work environment.

Expandability enables future growth

Future business expansion is built into the Dynamics 365 ecosystem for expandability within a familiar and user-friendly platform, so adoption is easy.

Planning for more growth ahead

Gardens Alive continues to embrace the right technology updates at the right time. With the successful launch of Dynamics 365 Finance, further automation of accounting processes like invoice generation, check management, and approval functions are imminent.

The next phase of implementation will include a full migration of purchase and production orders. Another goal is to connect online ordering channels with Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to make the company’s order processing more efficient.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will also give Gardens Alive the ability to understand customer segments, predict purchase behaviors, and unify transactional data with AI-powered identity management.

Gardens Alive currently has its eye on materials acquisition management systems to calculate the materials requirements based on complex demand forecast data. The AI-enriched material requirements planning (MRP) solution delivered by Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management would serve their materials planning needs well.

With the expansion of Dynamics 365 and all its valuable functionality, the next year promises greater efficiency and is sure to increase customer satisfaction and empower Gardens Alive’s people.