Faberlic moves 10x faster by bringing support under one solution

Nothing is more important to an international direct-to-consumer company than loyal and satisfied customers. Faberlic is no exception: it makes honest and open relationships a top priority.

This is not easy for a company that delivers over 4,000 cosmetic, health, home, and well-being products to millions of customers across 42 countries. Thousands of tickets pour in each day from users seeking support. Faberlic’s team knows that the quicker agents can solve these requests, the better the company can operate at scale. However, until the end of 2017, it was struggling under the constraints of an outdated system.

“Faberlic had no help desk and no support team,” Dmitrii Vertiporokh, director of Digital Development at Faberlic, said. “Five hundred employees shared responsibility for fielding requests. We relied on an ERP system built internally to manage the volume.”

Between 2015 and 2017, the company tripled in size. Support requests rained in from the contact form on Faberlic’s website and through numerous emails people found online or in printed catalogs. Its contact center leadership reported that customers weren’t getting answers to their requests. With billions of dollars in goods being processed, Faberlic’s relationship with its customers was compromised. It needed a solution that would allow it to centralise support and service the growing volume of requests.

To replace the existing system, Faberlic evaluated five solutions. Zendesk immediately stood out because it could easily be integrated with the company’s internal and third-party tools, such as JIRA. Faberlic’s IT department was especially excited because it heard positive reviews from other companies that use Zendesk.

Implementing Zendesk was part of a larger initiative to restructure the company’s support operations and processes. One of the largest tasks to tackle was getting tickets to the right teams. Faberlic worked with Ontec to build Ontec Predictor, a custom AI integration that is able to recognize a ticket’s text, categorise it as one of 113 different topics, and assign it to the correct agent or group. For several weeks, seven Faberlic employees manually routed requests to train the integration to recognise keywords and assign tickets to the correct topics. Faberlic has found that, even when a request contains only three or four words, Ontec’s algorithm is able to classify the request accurately. Today, the app routes tickets with 97 percent accuracy.

Faberlic uses Zendesk Guide to deflect tickets. Its team makes sure to keep content up-to-date so customers can effortlessly self-serve. The benefit is that Faberlic’s agents are able to spend more time offering the detailed, personalised responses that its customer base expects and prefer.

Previously, Faberlic turned to the IT department to create reports and identify trends. Now it can use Zendesk’s reporting, and especially the drill-in feature, to quickly see which topics have higher and lower CSAT ratings. Its contact center leadership also uses real-time data to proactively fix issues. For example, when the number of requests for a particular topic spikes, it is quickly able to reallocate resources to serve those inquiries.

Faberlic’s support team works remotely from different regions of Russia and several countries around the world. The Zendesk mobile app gives agents the flexibility to respond to requests on the go so that customers aren’t kept waiting.

Since Faberlic implemented Zendesk in November 2017, it has seen tangible results. Agents solve tickets ten times faster: before Zendesk it took, on average, about 100 hours to resolve a request; today full resolution time has dropped to 11 hours. Customers have noticed the improvement: Faberlic’s CSAT has jumped 10 percent and the CSAT survey response rate has more than doubled.

Moreover, the company does more with fewer resources. It went from having 500 employees solve requests while doing their other jobs, to 89 full-time agents. Faberlic also uses light agents to collaborate internally.

Though it can be hard to measure its impact on the company, Vertiporokh reiterated that customer experience deeply matters to Faberlic. “I compare the benefits of great customer service with those of reading books. It is impossible to say exactly how much knowledge a particular book will bring you. But you read anyway and feel how your inner world fills up with new and remarkable possibilities,” Vertiporokh said.