‘We have an ambition to be the world's most desired premium footwear brand’: How Dr Martens is working with Salesforce to create ‘agentic experiences’ for customers

Dr Martens is one of the most recognizable brands on earth, famed for its iconic footwear.

From the original ‘1460’ boot to more modern footwear, Dr Martens have been sported by punks, musicians, and an array of celebrities spanning all age ranges.

But with that global appeal comes a global operation, and engaging with customers is a significant challenge according to chief technology and AI officer, Graham Calder.

Calder tells ITPro that the brand has worked closely with Salesforce and Amazon to transform customer service capabilities for a modern, global audience.

Leveraging services such as Amazon Connect, Agentforce and Salesforce’s Service and Marketing Clouds, the brand is now delivering “agentic experiences” for customers. This push forms part of a broader transformation for the brand over the last decade, starting with a shift to direct to consumer (D2C) sales.

“Our products are timeless, but customer expectation and experience moves on,” he tells ITPro. “If you go back eight years, we were manufacturing and we were designing, but we didn’t do any direct consumer sales. We were almost entirely wholesale [and] worked through partners.”

“The previous strategy was about capitalizing on the opportunity of direct to consumer. So we have grown our direct to consumer channel to the point where it’s around two-thirds of our business.”

According to Calder, this shift highlighted failures with regard to customer care, especially as it now engages directly with consumers around the globe.

Dr Martens operates across 20 ecommerce markets globally and boasts 280 retail stores – from Tokyo to the US West Coast and “pretty much everywhere in between”, with its global headquarters housed in London.

“We’re a genuinely global operation with all the complexities and the complications that brings,” he says. “Part of our new strategy is that we have an ambition to be the world's most desired premium footwear brand.”

Tech fragmentation at Dr Martens

The company quickly learned that operating across these markets was having an impact on consumer relations, and a key factor here lay in what Calder describes as a highly fragmented technology estate.

“We had lots of regional solutions. We had no consistency of policy, no consistency of data, no consistency of journeys, experience,” he tells ITPro. “It was all kind of different. So we were a global brand, but we didn't turn up that way if you were doing customer care.”

That lack of consistency meant the company’s customer care proposition was “lagging behind”, resulting in a steady decline in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and Trustpilot ratings.

Embarking on an overhaul of customer support, Calder says the company began exploring “agentic experiences” for customers, tapping into the wave of powerful new agents capable of interacting with customers. It’s here that the work with Salesforce began.

Initially, Calder notes that the state of fragmentation was daunting, with customer care agents in different regions using different platforms, which in turn were disparate and detached.

“We had Zendesk in the USA, we had Salesforce in UK and Europe,” he says. “Neither was being used to its full potential. When I looked at the Salesforce usage in our contact centers, I was staggered. I mean, we were probably using about 2% of its capacity.”

“When you looked at the setup of the actual estate, it was completely fragmented,” he adds. “The telephony platform didn’t connect to the CRM, the order management systems didn’t connect to the CRM. Nothing was connected.”

Calder describes this early stage of the transformation as a “classic human swivel chair integration” that required a complete rethink of the technology stack.

“There was no consistency, which actually is quite a useful thing because at that point you realize I could try and fix this, or I could just assume that that is not where you would start and just get rid of it,” he explains.

In this case, Dr Martens chose the latter. The company pivoted to Salesforce, allowing the company to consolidate fragmented data sources and deliver a more unified approach in customer support.

“Because it was doing very little, it was also very clean, so we didn’t have to re-implement,” he says. This proved equally valuable for Amazon Connect, which plays a key role in the agentic customer experience, Calder adds.

The company has two instances of Connect “running identically” for latency purposes, and both these plug into Salesforce.

“Everything runs off the same data model, same single version of the truth, same single customer record, and it's all fully integrated into our commerce systems and all of our various other systems, which our old technology wasn't," Calder says.

“Agents don’t wear shoes” – but they do handle queries

A key focus for Dr Martens lies in the use of agents for handling customer queries. Indeed, the company set a long-term target of 75% of all customer contacts being fully automated. The company currently resolves around 50% of responses autonomously.

Applying agents was only one part of the equation, however. As with any transformation, Calder notes that getting people on board is critical.

“Whenever you’re doing digital transformation, you often get asked the question ‘what’s the most important element of it?’ and the technology people will nine times out of ten say ‘the technology?’ - but actually, it isn’t,” he says.

“It’s the people, because the technology doesn’t design, build, and operate itself. It’s the people that do that.”

Calder says that you can have the “best technology in the world” but if you don’t have the talent to use it, things will ultimately fall flat. Indeed, the nature of the “swivel chair integration” made it hard for customer care agents.

This meant the company worked extensively on boosting skills, getting them up to speed with new tools and technologies to support them in their role, and enabling them to work alongside agents.

When a human agent isn’t available, for example, AI agents will fill in the gaps, allowing for seamless engagement. Of course, there’s always a fallback in the event that customers demand a human customer care agent.

Calder adds that Salesforce’s ease of use was a key factor in easing staff into these changes.

“Part of why we selected Salesforce is it’s a fantastic platform for giving you that single pane of glass,” he says. “It’s got all of those capabilities to allow you to plug other things in. It’s all at the fingertips, it’s all integrated into the console.”

This has proved valuable so far and has had a positive impact on workers by reducing complexity. It ultimately benefits customers though, who know the brand will be on call to assist with queries – and that was always the primary focus.

“AI agents don’t wear shoes,” he says. “There’s always a human at the end of this.”

“The core of what we stand for is about the individual,” Calder adds. “It’s about self expression, creativity, your ability to be yourself. It’s so fundamental to what we do, and therefore it is really important that we always give you the way to get to the human if the automation doesn't work.”

Building on success

Dr Martens carefully considered the use of agents in customer care, according to Calder. This project aimed to improve experiences, but not at the expense of CSAT or Trustpilot scores.

The goal here was to streamline customer engagement while also boosting those numbers, which at offset were far from ideal and in the “red zone” at around 2.5 out of five on Trustpilot.

So far, the scheme has proved successful. The design work began in December last year and the project went live in June this year. Calder says the results have been eye-opening.

“Objective number one, which was [to] turn around the trend in CSAT and Trustpilot, has happened,” he says. “I think it’s been quite surprising to people that it’s happened so quickly.”

“I think we’re now back up into the amber zone,” Calder adds.

Dr Martens’ Trustpilot score currently sits at 3.2 out of five, right within the aforementioned amber zone. Over the medium term, Calder says the company wants to “get up to around 4.5 out of five.”