CustomEyes Book Store for Guide Dogs

Dear friends,

In this post, we’d like to tell you more about the project we’ve done for Guide Dogs. Keep reading to learn more details and how Guide Dogs benefits from implementing the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform for the mission they do.

What Do Guide Dogs Do

Guide Dogs provides a range of services to support people with visual impairment, equipping them with the skills they need to lead an active and independent life.

Children can have sight problems too but having a vision impairment shouldn’t stop them from knowing the joy of reading. That’s why with CustomEyes Books, they want to give children the chance to read a real book, just like every other child, for the same cost as every other child. This not only helps them keep up at school but also means they can share books with friends.

CustomEyes Books has over 4,200 large print books available. Each one is custom made, with font size, spacing, color and more all tailored to each child’s individual needs.

The Challenges Guide Dogs Faced

The process to order a book was very slow and tedious with the customer needing to sift through many libraries of PDF pages to see what titles were available. Quite often, they would just call support to save time in their search, which was time consuming for the team. PDF form Orders would then be placed by email or by post with the risk of getting lost and ultimately not being processed. Generating a lot of frustration on both sides.

Guide Dogs knew they had to digitalize the overall process to provide a better customer experience and streamline operations. To create an online bookstore for members to easily search, browse the thousands of titles available to them, place their order and ultimately pay online. Guide Dogs wanted customers to be able to choose and customize book recommendations based on a child’s eyesight parameters, and then save those custom preferences in their customer profile to make ordering more books easy in the future. Salesforce Experience Cloud was the perfect fit to achieve their goals.

Solution Provided by Advanced Communities

The customer-facing side of Experience Cloud allowed CustomEyes to present the information they hold in their core systems, like book titles and customer information, directly to customers, allowing centralized customer information.

To make the distribution of CustomEyes large print books easier and more flexible, Advanced Communities provided Guide Dogs with the AC eCommerce component for launching an easy-to-use online store on their existing website. Some personalization was made to meet the client’s specific needs.

Benefits and Results

The feedback has been great, from customers who have found the shop easy to use, to the production team who now get notified of orders instantly. CustomEyes can now respond quickly to customer feedback and effectively improve the entire system with this end-to-end service. The production team has control over what books are available, and can add members quickly and easily to the store via a welcome email with a link to create their store login. They can even leverage dynamic content display!

Guide Dogs’ mission is simple: to help people with visual impairment live the life they choose. Offering visually-impaired children more choices through services like CustomEyes may seem like a small thing to most, but to a child learning to read it’s everything and a stronger digital infrastructure enables Guide Dogs to deliver these life-changing tools to the children who need them most.

Customers have a much better journey with not just less but more simplified steps, as well as full visibility on their orders status.

Beyond the improved functionality and ease of use, the data speaks for itself:

• From 2018 to 2020, the average order monthly growth was 61%. Since implementing the solution it has more than doubled with 135%.

• The number of books per order has also increased.
• Furthermore, the donations are growing as well; 23% of the orders include a donation between 1 and 15 points.

Watch the video to see what was implemented:

Conclusion

Advanced Communities are proud to be a part of such a good initiative. We are always happy to use our skills and expertise to improve your experience, digitalize processes and create a good-looking, easy-to-use site for your customers. Contact us for help with Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation or configuration.