by Carlos Dias, Senior Relationship Manager, Heineken Brazil 

On a typical Monday morning just a few years ago, my team would face a daunting task: sifting through 5,000 weekend messages from customers — each one requiring a thoughtful, manual response. The sheer volume was overwhelming, and the pace felt impossible. Fast forward to today, and we’re handling more interactions than ever, but with a fraction of the effort, thanks to a strategic overhaul that’s redefined customer care at Heineken Brazil. 

As Heineken Brazil grew from a single brand presence on Facebook to representing 22 brands across multiple channels, the complexity of consumer interactions skyrocketed. What started as a simple process of responding to a manageable number of inquiries soon became unworkable. The increasing volume, variety and speed of conversations demanded a new approach, one that combined advanced technology with a clear focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences. 

 I'm currently the Senior Relationship Manager, leading the team that manages interactions with millions of end-consumers across multiple channels.  As Heineken Brazil expanded its brand portfolio, my team became responsible for an increasing number of touchpoints, including additional social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter (now X). By 2012, my team had reached a tipping point: we had too many interactions across too many channels. Responding manually within each platform took too much time, and we needed help to keep up. 

Gaining a holistic view of customer interactions

At that point, I introduced a Brazilian social media engagement tool called Scup, which centralized interactions and eliminated the need for my team to work within individual social media platforms. It was a great start, and the transformation became even more dramatic after Sprinklr acquired Scup in 2020. 

Sprinklr enables stronger customer engagement because we can see and engage with all the praise, complaints and requests that come our way, whether via direct messages, public comments or tagging. The platform also turns those interactions into an important data source for the company. Three people now manage our consumer interactions across all social channels and another four-person team analyzes the data. 

Because Sprinklr delivers a complete overview of our activities, I can quickly understand my team’s performance, SLAs, time to resolution and other metrics. We also have many dashboards that provide valuable social data to the marketing teams for our various brands. 

To help us get the most out of our solution, Sprinklr's Managed Services* consultant took the lead with this optimization initiative, bringing her deep knowledge of our account and operations. She developed a customized strategy that included a new tagging system and automated pre-tagging, which significantly reduced the time we spent classifying data. Now, every closed case tagged by Intuition is automatically mapped to the correct campaign and custom fields. She also built a workflow that allows us to easily feed Intuition with new terms and expressions, so we can continuously improve automation without adding to our workload.

AI lets us deliver human attention where it’s needed most

The transition to Sprinklr has enabled us to manage consumer interactions efficiently across various channels, including social, email, voice and WhatsApp. Sprinklr AI has fundamentally changed our operations by automating responses to routine consumer inquiries. It now assists with 78% of our consumer interactions, allowing the team to process cases 75% faster and more accurately. Only 22% of cases need a live agent, so my team is more productive and can focus on the complex and sensitive cases that need the most attention. 

Remember those 5,000 messages we used to receive on Monday mornings? Using Sprinklr AI, that number has dropped to just 500 actionable messages. On a personal level, my team has experienced less stress and a healthier work-life balance. On a professional level, we have more time to improve the quality of our customer interactions. 

The value of listening: customer care as an early warning system

Using Sprinklr has enabled my team to deliver value to Heineken far beyond our traditional customer service role. 

Social listening is our early warning system for any mounting crisis. The key to this is the Sprinklr Salesforce integration, which allows us to cross-reference social media data with other customer touchpoints, such as email and phone support. Speed is critical in a crisis.  

With the ability to easily cross-reference social and Salesforce data, my team can quickly identify emerging issues and inform legal, corporate affairs and the brand team so they can take appropriate action before an issue escalates. We often spot these issues first—even before external agency partners. 

By leveraging social listening, we’ve also become a research arm and information hub for our marketing departments, helping them make crucial brand decisions. With our finger on the pulse of what our customers are saying, we can track public sentiment, understand consumer behavior and gauge the effectiveness of brand activations, such as music festivals or sponsorships.  

For example, we recently produced a report on whether our consumers associate our brands with different music genres. Analyzing social media conversations, we can understand how specific Brazilian demographics  — age, gender and location  — relate to musical styles like pop, rock and samba. Instead of musical styles, we could just as easily examine hobbies, sports or food and beverage pairings. The next step is using this information to tailor our brands’ marketing and sponsorship campaigns to fit consumer preferences more accurately. 

Continuous work to enhance the customer experience

Sprinklr has transformed our work on the customer care team. We plan to integrate AI and automation into our workflows further so we can dedicate more time to developing strategic and creative solutions for Heineken. My team is learning to use more Sprinklr AI capabilities like Smart Response to accelerate response times and enhance consumer satisfaction. As we become more proficient, we will continue working toward our goal of creating a fully omnichannel experience where consumers can interact seamlessly across multiple touchpoints, from social media to email to voice. 

By embracing Sprinklr’s cutting-edge capabilities, Heineken Brazil has turned customer service from a reactive function into a proactive, data-driven team that powers strategic decisions, identifies and acts on emerging opportunities, and brings the company closer to our customers. 

*Note: These initiatives were configured by Sprinklr's Managed Services team, responsible for driving customer results by demonstrating ROI through best-in-class solutions aligned with customer goals.