Over the last couple of years, e-commerce companies from all landscapes have seen a rapid change in the shopping habits and preferences of their customers. To deal with this shift, business leaders have had to implement a wider range of CX tools to enable more consistent, streamlined customer service.
Two companies who managed to not only survive but thrive in the pandemic thanks to the right CX innovation, were Skinnydip, and Cult Beauty. The Cult Beauty brand stocks carefully curated products from over 300 brands and serves around 2 million customers with a team of only 40 customer service professionals.
Skinnydip is a rapidly evolving fashion and accessories company that has rapidly made the transition into a more e-commerce-focused world in recent years. When Cult Beauty and Skinnydip both saw their offices become 100% home-based as a result of the pandemic, they turned to Zendesk to keep customer service running smoothly.
Let’s take a look at how Zendesk worked with Skinnydip and Cult Beauty.
Implementing New Strategies with Zendesk
According to Cult Beauty, implementing Zendesk as a solution for managing customer service tickets and strategies became a significant driver to the company’s success. Crucially, both brands said that while Zendesk technology helped them to keep a closer eye on the needs of their customers, it also meant they could better support their customer service teams in a changing workplace.
With access to an all-in-one environment for tracking customer service strategies, Skinnydip and Cult Beauty could empower their teams to accomplish more. Zendesk also integrated with the tools the organisations were already using to support their teams, like Slack and Zoom.
With Skinnydip’s brick-and-mortar stores closed during the pandemic, and Cult Beauty experiencing double the typical demand for customer service, both brands noted Zendesk was an essential tool for keeping track of sales and keeping customers aware of any delays caused by issues with their supply chain. The proactive approach the two organisations were able to take to customer service using Zendesk led to an extremely “positive” response from their customers.
Zendesk technology also allowed Skinnydip and Cult Beauty to leverage better methods of onboarding new employees to deal with peaks in demand. According to Skinnydip, it only takes around 2 weeks to have a new employee fully engaged and ready to excel in the team.
Preparing for Success in Uncertain Times
For both brands, preparing for peak periods (which usually starts anywhere as early as October and ends towards the close of January) is all about agility and preparation. Zendesk has been a helpful tool for this purpose too. Within the Zendesk platform, Cult Beauty and Skinnydip can both leverage a range of macros, triggers, and automations, ideal for improving productivity.
According to Skinnydip, their team had been working from templates in previous years to manually respond to customer queries. However, implementing macros with Zendesk had a significant impact on their email levels. The use of automation meant teams could handle the highest demand the customer service inbox had ever had in 2020 (More than 2,602 emails with an average response time of 42 hours).