Unifying global customer service for MSA Safety

The challenge

MSA Worldwide LLC, known as The Safety Company, is a global leader in safety product development and manufacturing. Headquartered in Pennsylvania with approximately 5,200 team members worldwide, MSA serves industries including oil and gas, fire service, construction and mining across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific.

MSA is a longtime Salesforce customer engaged in a multi-year improvement initiative. The company wanted to use its Salesforce investment to drive progress toward revenue and profitability goals, differentiate its customer service, and tailor its processes and resources to serve both high-value and limited-value customers more effectively.

In this phase of the engagement, MSA asked TELUS Digital to help align the customer service processes used by its teams in AMER, EMEA and APAC. TELUS Digital was selected as MSA's partner based on its global team, dedicated AI and data practice, and industry-first perspective on customer care and process alignment.

Before the engagement, MSA faced several interconnected challenges:

• Customer service processes were inconsistent across regions. Teams in EMEA and APAC used different tools and workflows than teams in AMER.
• Knowledge was decentralized outside AMER. Product, internal process and protocol documentation was not easily accessible to EMEA and APAC teams.
• Case and customer data were siloed. Service representatives managed cases through email and stored case data in personal inboxes, making it impossible for employees to get an instant, accurate view of a customer's account or open cases. Sales and service conversations were disjointed, with no cross-department visibility.
• Core processes relied on manual work. Activities such as case creation, handling, prioritization, escalation and closure, along with order refund approval, were handled largely over email and required manual input.
• Partners had no dedicated communication channel. Distributors lacked a way to provide feedback, ask questions or open and manage cases with MSA Customer Service.

The TELUS Digital solution

TELUS Digital worked closely with MSA to define a differentiated customer care experience and align service processes across the company's AMER, EMEA and APAC teams. The engagement included:

• Guiding process standardization for teams in the EMEA and APAC regions
• Implementing Service Cloud for MSA's customer service teams
• Implementing an Experience Cloud portal for MSA's distributor partners
• Implementing Salesforce Knowledge and advising on data migration
• Applying automation to streamline core processes, including credit and debit memo approval, case routing and assignment, and case escalation
• Redesigning the case creation experience for service representatives
• Migrating internal and external communication from Comments to Chatter

The result

With standardized processes and a unified Salesforce foundation in place, MSA is positioned to advance its broader strategic goals across regions and customer segments.

Teams in AMER, EMEA and APAC now operate from the same processes and tools, closing the gap that once had each region working its own way.

Distributor partners, who previously had no formal channel to reach MSA customer service, can now communicate directly and manage their own cases. And with that shared foundation in place, MSA can tailor its processes and resources to serve high-value and limited-value customers differently, and deliver the more differentiated customer service experience it set out to build.