Creating meaningful customer connections with Zendesk

Whether for a birthday, an anniversary, a new baby or a gesture to show that someone is in your thoughts, gifting and receiving flowers is always an emotional experience, which is why building meaningful customer relationships is critical in the flower delivery business.

Bloom & Wild has done just that. Since it was founded in 2013, the company has revolutionised the flower delivery industry with its unique approach to delivering flowers directly through the letterbox. It is now one of the most successful startups in the UK, securing more than £20 million in funding and managing thousands of orders each day across the UK, France and Germany.

Bloom & Wild partnered with Zendesk in 2014 to provide its customers with the best experience possible, and it’s been instrumental in continuing this growth.

“Our mission is to be the most loved flower gifting company. This sits at the heart of everything we do. From the way we select our flowers and design each bouquet to the way we interact with our customers,” said Isobel Mills, Lead Customer Delight Manager at Bloom & Wild.

“When we started working with Zendesk almost five years ago, we had only email support. Since then, we’ve managed to expand our customer service capabilities dramatically and been able to achieve this mission. Zendesk has been a great strategic partner to us throughout these years, helping us understand where our customer service demand lies and how to address it more effectively.”

Driving scalability to support business growth and peaks in activity

Currently the company employs more than 25 customer service agents who manage between 3,000 and 3,500 customer enquiries every week. This number rises dramatically during peak times such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Mothers’ Day.

One key feature of Zendesk is the ability to use analytics to forecast customer demand and plan for peak activity. Bloom & Wild experiences a three-to-fivefold increase in customer enquiries during such times. For instance, on Valentines’ Day 2019, Bloom & Wild saw a 300% increase in customer enquiries. Zendesk analytics helped Isobel’s team forecast this demand and made the strategic decision to hire 60 temporary agents. As a result, the team successfully handled 9,000 customer enquiries over the week.

“Ensuring our customers receive the attention and support that they need during peak times is critical. While having the right number of agents during busy periods is key to providing the best support, the capacity of our agents to manage such a large volume of customer enquiries has been largely driven by the great flexibility of tools and support features within Zendesk. This enables us to respond quickly to customer enquiries across multiple channels and ensure customers are happy regardless of how busy we are,” commented Isobel.

Creating multiple touchpoints with the customer

Understanding how customers want to engage with the brand was a key priority for Bloom & Wild. Currently, agents are able to manage customer enquiries across Twitter, email, phone calls, online chat, Facebook Messenger and SMS, all through Zendesk. This omnichannel support has been instrumental to the success of Bloom & Wild’s customer engagement strategy.

“When we started building our customer service programme, we wanted to increase the touchpoints with the customer as much as possible so that we can offer better service and engage with all our customers using the channels that they prefer,” explained Isobel.

“Zendesk allows us to ensure continuity of customer interactions across all channels. This means that if a customer calls with an initial enquiry and then follows up via email or Facebook Messenger, our agents will be able to identify them as the same person, giving them all the context they need to deliver great customer service. This is very important as our customers often tend to contact us through multiple channels within the space of a few hours, particularly when they are worried about an order being delivered on time for an important occasion,” she added.

Having more touchpoints with the customer also means increased opportunities for engaging with customers from different backgrounds. For instance, while digital channels work well for the predominantly millennial customers in London, a significant proportion of the customers outside of the capital are a bit older and prefer interaction over the phone.

Using analytics to improve work efficiency

Using data to forecast peak activity is just one of the ways in which Bloom & Wild is utilising the insights from the customer service software. Zendesk’s analytics tools enable Isobel and her team to improve work efficiency by analysing which activities consume most of the agents’ time and how to organise work more effectively.

This helps the management team to get a better view of the work that needs to be done across all channels and allows them to identify different trends that they can use to improve the performance of customer service staff.

In addition, Zendesk is very easy to use, so everyone within the business can benefit from the functionalities it offers.

“Zendesk requires very little training, meaning we can quickly onboard new or temporary staff. In fact, every new employer at Bloom & Wild is trained on how to use Zendesk during their first week in our company. We are proud to be a customer-first company, so everyone within our business needs to be able to directly interact with customers from the very start and use the data insights to better understand their needs.”

Looking into the future

The customer satisfaction score of the company is a testament that this strategy works. Bloom & Wild has a customer satisfaction score of 97 from the customers who contact the Customer Delight team. They use the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure the impact of Customer Delight as well as other areas of business on overall customer satisfaction. Despite this exceptional CSAT score achievement, Isobel and her team are continuously looking to innovate with customer service and expand their multichannel support for customers.

“We are now looking to integrate WhatsApp and will continue to evolve our services to ensure our customers really enjoy working with us and we continue to be the most loved flower delivery company in the UK.”