If you own a pet in the UK, you know the name Pets at Home. As the UK’s largest pet chain, they provide everything a pet might need from retail products and grooming to veterinarian services and supplies. When COVID-19 affected their operations, Pets at Home wanted to make it easy for customers to connect without coming in store. How? Pets At Home connected customers with a team of Blue Prism digital workers.

Challenge

The Pets at Home network is the UK’s largest pet chain, providing a broad range of pet-related services at nearly 1,000 separate locations. Predictably, this generates a high volume of customer inquiries and contacts each week. Where digital native customers typically preferred to connect using online channels, rather than engage face-to-face, the arrival of COVID-19 broadened this preference. And as lockdowns came into effect across the UK, the option to visit a store in person was made more complicated. Pets at Home has always been committed to serving pets and their owners with warmth and empathy, so losing that connection was not an option. They were determined to serve their customers as they always had, despite new restrictions.

Solution

Pets at Home brought in a team of Blue Prism digital workers to help its human workers manage the sharp increase of customer inquiries through digital channels. Integrating seamlessly with Salesforce®, the digital workers were tasked to respond to many of the simpler queries, the most common of which was a request for an order update. Now freed from answering these simpler requests, the human workers at Pets at Home can return to having more valuable, in-depth conversations with customers about their much-loved pets.

What’s next for Pets at Home? During the early days of the pandemic, the automation team used intelligent automation to deliver relevant data to executive staff, enabling them to make informed decisions quickly. They now plan to use the same method with live customer data to provide a tailored experience for each pet owner.