How Norths Collective Built a Three-Phase Plan for Agentic AI Success

Many brands are seeing the benefits of agentic AI extend far beyond efficiency – it has become a direct driver of revenue. This has been the case for Norths Collective, the profit-for-purpose hospitality group based in Australia. Norths Collective has harnessed data and AI to create a powerful engine for loyalty and growth.

It all started five years ago when the company embarked on a journey with Salesforce to grow and engage its membership base. In that time, the group has increased membership renewal by almost 20% and built a thriving community of more than 76,000 members. 

We asked Robert Lopez, Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at Norths Collective, to share the group’s digital transformation journey and how it has fast-tracked success with Agentforce.  

Here are his key takeaways, including tips for maximizing engagement and ROI. 

Data-driven transformation boosts loyalty and ROI

For Norths Collective, the biggest opportunity for growth wasn’t in acquiring new members, who tend to join organically, but in investing in member retention. The group embarked on a digital transformation to enhance member communication, service, and overall experience. Its transformation was guided by three key objectives:

• Obtain a full 360-degree view of the customer to centralize and maximize first-party data
• Enhance business analytics to boost efficiency and equip the executive team with actionable data for informed decision-making
• Introduce hyper-personalized marketing capabilities across all channels to increase customer loyalty and engagement

Once member data was centralized on Salesforce, Norths Collective used Marketing Cloud to hyper-personalize communications. 

With better segmentation, AI-driven personalization, and the ability to continually optimize messaging and send times, Norths Collective has achieved up to 13x return on campaign investment. Members are also more loyal, visiting venues about 6.6 times per year, compared with just four times in the past. 

Fast-tracking success with Agentforce 

Norths Collective’s structured, data-driven journey has paved the way for its use of Agentforce.  The group is more than halfway through its three-phase plan to apply agentic automation across its business.

The first phase, a customer-facing service agent, went live in just six weeks. It successfully reduced inbound calls to the contact center by almost 10%, which freed up the team to focus on high-value, revenue-driving conversations —supporting growth in their department.

Plus, the service agent allows Norths Collective to be there for members when they want to communicate. A staggering 33% of all messaging sessions since launch have taken place when the call center is offline.

Building on this success, Norths Collective launched phase two and enabled members to interact with the agent to update their profiles, manage marketing preferences, and carry out tasks like making restaurant reservations

The vision for phase three is to roll out Agentforce for Marketing. This will involve using the campaign creation agent to drive even more ROI through advanced segmentation and personalization.

How Norths Collective accelerated time to value 

Norths Collective’s thorough planning and preparation helped fast-track the first two phases of its Agentforce launch. Its approach included: 

• Change management: With Agentforce, Lopez and his team engaged with C-level executives, senior managers, and frontline employees to identify drivers and desired outcomes from AI. These conversations helped Norths Collective set targets and prioritize use cases.
• Operational readiness: Using Data Cloud, Norths Collective focused on unifying, cleansing, and validating the data AI agents needed to work. It also analyzed call center data to better understand customer interactions and optimise knowledge articles to answer common questions. To further support operational readiness, Norths Collective reviewed resourcing and established roles and responsibilities for processes such as updating knowledge articles.
• Identify and prioritize use cases: Norths Collective made the strategic decision to go live with a customer-facing agent, rather than starting with an internal tool. The primary use case was to enable agents to handle routine queries, thereby giving the call center team more time to focus on high-value calls, such as booking large corporate events. 

Tips for maximizing engagement and ROI

Underpinning Norths Collective’s entire transformation has been a sharp focus on measurable returns. This approach empowers the team to be agile, reallocating funds away from activities with unclear ROI and doubling down on what works. 

Lopez’s tips for engagement and ROI include:

• Start with a clear vision, not the technology. According to Lopez, you don’t need to be a technology expert to succeed with agentic AI. Instead, the most critical element is having a clear vision and conviction in what you want to achieve and communicating this to partners and internal stakeholders.
• Invest strategically. Lopez adheres to a simple philosophy: “Cents make up dollars, but dollars don’t always make sense”. This means every dollar spent must have a strong business case and a clear path to driving revenue.
• Maximize first-party data. Norths Collective’s strategy is built on using strong, first-party customer data to understand members and drive hyper-personalization.
• Use AI to augment your team. A critical part of Norths Collective’s change management was ensuring the call center team understood that the agent was a tool to help them. The agent enhances their work by handling routine inquiries, freeing them to focus on high-value conversations. This approach has encouraged adoption and made the team’s work more rewarding. 

Lopez identifies Marketing Cloud Next as a game changer that will bring agentic marketing to life and put an end to ‘do-not-reply’ messages, so every communication channel becomes a two-way conversation. With agentic marketing, Norths Collective is also targeting further increases in campaign level and bottom-line ROI. 

“The more we embrace agentic AI to understand trends and behaviors and drive even stronger personalization, the more we will be able to enhance engagement and ROI,” he says.