How a D2C firm revitalized its rewards program on Salesforce

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Sustainable Salons relied on its rewards programs to maximize revenue per customer. But clunky, legacy technology wasn’t letting that happen. Here is the story about how they changed that with StoreConnect.

CLIENT NAME

Sustainable Salons

INDUSTRY

Manufacturing

PROJECT LENGTH

5-7 Months

TEAM SIZE

TECHNOLOGIES

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Sustainable Salons is a Social Enterprise that rewards salons and gives back to the community. Founded by Paul Frasca and Ewelina Soroko in 2015, Sustainable Salons specializes in collecting up to 95% of the salon waste bin and redirecting the materials for reuse, recycling, and repurposing. The Sustainable Salons program began in hairdressing salons. There are now sustainable beauty salons, dermal clinics, barbers, and pet groomers. They provide consumers with an easy way to eliminate 95% of the negative impacts of their salon service at a cost less than a cup of coffee, simply by choosing a Sustainable Salons member salon.

Why Now

Rewarding their paying members for recycling salon wastes is the core of the Sustainable Salons Business. Yet, their Rewards Store was on a siloed, legacy platform and at end of life. They needed a new solution that would not only fill their current technology requirement, but help them grow and evolve into the future. After starting their evaluation process Shopify, Magento and StoreConnect were the three solutions to make it to the final round. Ultimately StoreConnect was selected for a few reasons: First, it worked natively with their existing CRM and rewards program logic, second it required no customised integrations and lastly, StoreConnect was the most complete and cost-effective solution presented that fulfiled both their current requirements and features they knew would assist growth in the years to come.

The Project

Whilst choosing StoreConnect to run their business is something we are proud of, the results the business generates has our team in complete awe.

For example, before Sustainable Salons introduced its ponytail donation campaign in 2015, almost all hair used in medical wigs was sourced on the black market, from 3rd world countries. Today 98% of all the hair used in these wigs is donated by customers of member salons.

Since it's inception, Sustainable Salons has been responsible for:

- 1,992,522 kilograms of resources diverted from landfill

- 329,906 meal donations to OzHarvest and KiwiHarvest

- 74,491 salon bookings from their #1 salon directory

So, how does the program work? Sustainable Salons is a profit-for-purpose organization that rescues valuable resources from landfill. They repurpose salon waste in a way that benefits the planet and gives back to the community.

Rewarding member salons who recycle is a cornerstone of the business. It requires a unique technology mix that is both efficient and affordable.

When Sustainable Salons were running a legacy version of Magento which required a slew of other technologies to integrate and manage their salon directory, Salesforce Communities member portal and other systems. Reporting on stock or updating member points required logging into minimally 4 systems to ensure information was properly reconciled.

Working with StoreConnect and their implementation partner, they replaced Magento and their other SaaS eCommerce solutions and migrated the eCommerce, rewards and in-person sales to StoreConnect.

Choosing to go with StoreConnect has resulted in a consolidation of the majority of Sustainable Salons technology natively onto Salesforce. This allowed efficiencies and a simplification of technologies in use. At the same time they increase the features available for use by using. This also allowed automations with Salesforce flows across all customer facing operations.

Users now had the ability to access the StoreConnect Rewards store via single sign-on from the Salesforce Community portal. By using a native solution, the transition for customers was seamless.

In summary, many businesses would like to make a difference, but few could even dream of creating the kind of impact that Sustainable Salons has achieved over the last decade. Their business has made sustainability into good business for salons; completely changed the way hair is sourced for medical wigs; and introduced multiple game-changing opportunities for their member salons that have resulted in 30% higher revenues and 15-20% higher margins. This change for good is in no small part influenced by the efficiencies they generate through leveraging technology like StoreConnect and Salesforce.

The Moment of Trust

Initially burdened with disparate systems and manual processes, Sustainable Salons turned to StoreConnect for a comprehensive solution. The pivotal moment came when StoreConnect and its implementation partner streamlined Sustainable Salons' operations by migrating their eCommerce, rewards program, and in-person sales onto Salesforce, consolidating their technology stack. Anuj Dhawan, the Innovation Lead at Sustainable Salons, emphasized the significance of this transformation, highlighting a 20-30% time savings in product setup and reporting. This was the beginning of a profound shift in Sustainable Salons' approach, marking the beginning of a transformative partnership that continues to drive sustainable impact and operational excellence.

The Eureka Moment

After the launch of their rewards store, Sustainable Salons were looking for new ways to onboard customers. The team created a new store specifically for new customers. Then they launched it by texting the link to people who might be interested in exploring a tiny porthole into the Sustainable Salons ecosystem. Immediately, one of the customers went to the link on their mobile phone and purchased the product. The StoreConnect eCommerce platform did the rest - it created a customer, account, order and payment record in Salesforce immediately – it had everything needed to create a new customer in Salesforce.

The Ribbon Cutting Moment

I can safely say it's a 20 to 30 % time saving when it comes to actual product setup and reporting. Because both of those things used to happen in two different platforms. Suddenly all of that is just in Salesforce and the reports are out of the box. When you set up your first product always takes half an hour to an hour to two hours. But then after that, when you need to make it available in the next territory or for the next customer base or at a new price point or any of that stuff, it's almost instantaneous. - Anuj, Head of Innovation, Sustainable Salons

There is no way we could have done all of this in the previous platform with the same amount of human resources. There is a 20-30% time saving when it comes to product set up and reporting now that we have moved our rewards stores to StoreConnect and no longer having different systems outside of Salesforce.

Anuj Dhawan, Innovation Lead, Sustainable Salons

TEAM

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