The 2018 CRM Service Elite Customers: Vega

Sprouting from the belief that you needn’t sacrifice nutrition for convenience, Vega makes certified vegan, gluten-free foods that are free of artificial flavors, colors, and sweeteners and ready for on-the-go consumption. According to its website, Vega’s mission includes sharing its passion for clean, plant-based nutrition through education and leading by example; delivering premium, innovative products to its customers; and nurturing a culture of sustainability.

The Canadian company, active since 2001 (and acquired in 2015 by WhiteWave, a maker of plant-based foods and beverages), launched its social customer care team in 2014 to establish a unified view of its social channels and an efficient way to engage with its community. Vega was looking to educate its community about its products and plant-based living via social media, and Instagram proved to be one of its most successful channels for customer engagement.

So the team recently turned to Conversocial, which provides cloud-based social customer service solutions, for further help with reaching and engaging customers on Instagram. Among other things, Vega wanted to use Instagram as a way of connecting with customers who would go on to serve as brand ambassadors, and to generally increase positive brand sentiment on the channel.

“From the outset, Vega’s main goal was to create a proactive strategy on Instagram to surprise and delight customers, educate our community about our products, [and] provide lifestyle tips and plant-based recipes,” says Bridgette Clare, customer experience team lead at Vega. “We strongly believe that social customer engagement is the key to building brand loyalty and fostering meaningful relationships, and we needed a platform that enabled us to have a unified view of our social channels and an efficient way to engage with our community.”

Conversocial helped with all of these goals, Clare says. Its solution, which proved seamless for Vega’s sales reps and agents and effortless for its customers, enabled Vega to engage with its community of customers on the channel “in the moment and at scale,” Clare says. She adds that Conversocial “has been focusing on engaging consumers over social channels before it was popular and understood the value of a solution that was solely dedicated to social customer engagement.”

With the belief that “customer service should be effortless,” Conversocial’s core platform provides a number of capabilities designed to streamline the customer service process. These include automatically threading together public and private messages; routing conversations back to the original agent; and assigning conversations based on agent specialization, triggers, and topics. It also enables collaborative resolution management.

“We believed that Conversocial’s values aligned with ours—to provide the best possible service in the most engaging and convenient manner,” Clare says.

Conversocial has yielded real results for Vega; after implementing the vendor’s platform, Vega was able to deliver 20,195 responses to customers on Instagram, representing a 221 percent increase year-over-year, and establish an average handling time of 1 minute and 17 seconds, representing an 18 percent decrease year-over-year. And thanks to Conversocial, Vega built a 98.5 percent positive brand sentiment on the social media channel.

“Social engagement is about authenticity, and the only way to be human and real with your customers is to find a way to scale meaningful interactions,” Clare says. “Because of Conversocial’s platform, we are able to have ongoing and meaningful conversations with our community.”

Feeding off the success of its initial rollout, Vega added a click-to-chat feature to its consumer phone line, giving consumers the option to shift from phone to Facebook Messenger. “Conversocial, paired with this feature, has given us the ability to keep the conversation going and engage with our consumers in a timely way, exactly where they want to connect with us,” Clare says. 

After implementing Conversocial's social engagement platform, Vega was able to:

• deliver 20,195 responses to customers on Instagram, a 221 percent increase year-over-year;
• establish an average handling time of 1 minute and 17 seconds, an 18 percent decrease year-over-year; and
• build a 98.5 percent positive brand sentiment on Instagram.