Back Market seizes the opportunity to optimise its customer service

In France, Europe and the United States: nobody can stop Back Market! The company has made the customer experience a priority by offering omnichannel customer service, including an extensive help centre and WhatsApp messaging. And the result: +10 points of customer satisfaction.

Why buy new when you can get just as good for less with reconditioned products that are better for the environment? It is by keeping this promise that Back Market has established itself over the course of 5 years as the champion of refurbishing in France, the United States, and several European countries.

Smartphones, computers, vacuum cleaners, cameras, dishwashers, TV… whether they are tech-savvy or “green”, customers can find absolutely everything in this market place, which is good for their wallets and for the planet!

Two-tiered customer service

To offer the best experience to consumers, this growing company offers refurbished products at the best quality/price ratio, but that’s not all! Their satisfaction also depends on the efficiency of its customer service. In the 8 countries where it operates, Back Market relies on a network of 150 advisers. Half are responsible for managing the brand’s own customer services, and the rest handle the community of 1,200 refurbishers listed on the marketplace, who have joined the Back Care service.

Since late 2017, the advisors and all the teams dedicated to the Back Market customer experience (quality, seller support, catalogue creation)—namely one third of the workforce—have been using Zendesk’s CRM platform. These include Support ticketing, Talk telephone, Guide self-service, Explore analysis and reporting solutions. It also integrates the Collaboration module, which facilitates interactions between teams, and theKnowledge Capture app, which allows advisors to continually enrich the knowledge base by adding helpful articles for clients.

Back Market also uses the Answer Bot tool to automate responses from knowledge base resources. Finally, the company has recently been offering the WhatsApp social network directly into the Back Market mobile application, which creates a fluid mobile contact experience for customers. The initial results have been very encouraging: a response 5 times faster than by email and a CSAT increased by 5 points. The teams are therefore planning to deploy this channel on a larger scale.

“The CRM platform that we used since the beginning was quite limited. We needed a new scalable and flexible tool in order to continue to grow in a reasonable way. The Zendesk SaaS solution has become an obvious choice given its maturity and its compatibility with our operating methods. We do a very large volume of ticketing, and Zendesk is the benchmark for automation and data output”, explains Nicolas Pellissier, Director of Customer Service, Quality, and Back Market Services.

Significant gains

“Our customers increasingly wish to find answers quickly and on their own, without having to speak to a human.”Alice Plainfossé, Process manager at Back Market Each week, 10,000 tickets are processed on the main channels (mail, webform, FAQ and via telephone, etc.): “Our customers increasingly wish to find answers quickly and on their own, without having to speak to a human. As a result, 6 months ago we deployed Zendesk Guide in order to provide FAQs to customers and merchants. This allowed us to significantly reduce our contact rate, especially by email. We are also making good progress with regard to Answer Bot, since this self-service tool based on artificial intelligence achieves a rate of 96% of automated article suggestions on the email and webform channels, a click rate greater than 25%, and a resolution rate greater than 8%”, explains Alice Plainfossé, Process Manager at Back Market. “We also need to monitor our activity in real time and control the data. I use Zendesk Explore every day to build personalised dashboards to share with our advisors. A few seconds are enough for me to retrieve the data I need.”

On the road to optimisation with Zendesk

The Back Market teams appreciate Zendesk’s willingness to work together to improve the tool, as Nicolas Pellissier explains: “We have reached a size where it made sense to consider creating an internal tool designed around our processes. It seems more suitable for us to make use of the flexibility of an external tool, which we continuously optimize with Zendesk.”

Alice Plainfossé agrees and adds: “I know I can ask my contacts at Zendesk for advice. They understand what is useful to us in terms of the functionality and services of the tool, while adapting to the Back Market culture on customer service. In terms of technical recommendations, Zendesk Support provides me with specific answers.”

Scalability: Reaching new heights

At Back Market, which has just completed a new round of fundraising of 110 million Euros, there are plenty of projects: “In addition to 24/7 service, the goal is to modernise our channels. We really believe in tools like WhatsApp. Halfway between email and telephone, they allow for both short and friendly conversations with our customers,” adds Nicolas Pellissier.

It also entails interfacing social networks with the Zendesk Sunshine platform: “To create a rapport with our customers, and to improve and accelerate their support, we need to understand where they come from, what they bring, and what they do with us. Sunshine will help us provide them with more relevant answers”, concludes Alice Plainfossé.

A marketplace … which is a client of a marketplace

Back Market improves its customer relationships and introduces innovation by also leveraging the applications and services available on the Marketplace Zendesk. Among these, Back Market has chosen:

• Miuros, to monitor the data and quality of its customer service and to automate its tasks and make recommendations to Service Advisers directly through Zendesk
• Tymeshift (now Zendesk WFM), an omnichannel personnel management software to better manage all call centre operations via Zendesk
• Slack, internal messaging to improve communication and processes between teams. The Slack application integrated into Zendesk Support makes it possible to centralise and facilitate ticket management, as well as to create tickets or internal notes and to receive notifications on such tickets.
• Deadline, which makes it possible to set alerts and reminders on tickets, as well as triggers to ensure responses are given on time
• Unbabel, which makes it possible to obtain quality translations for tickets in all languages
• Trustpilot, to collect and manage public customer feedback and to consolidate feedback into Zendesk for easy responses
• Stonly, which has allowed Back Market to set up interactive guides within the help centre’s articles in order to assist customers step by step in solving their problems.