Selective Marketplace revolutionises customer experience for its womenswear brands with Zendesk

Fashion company Selective Marketplace deployed Zendesk to build a call center for its womenswear brands and achieved 97% customer satisfaction.

“I’ve never known anything like Zendesk before. It was - and still is - an amazing experience. Zendesk lifted us up from day one. Your guidance and solutions are simply the best and so easy to implement. Everyone can use Zendesk!”

Agnieszka Kulpinska

Head of Customer Success at Selective Marketplace

“Zendesk made us so brave that we recently started offering our customer care services to another brand’s customers. From creating the brand’s business rules, schedules, automations, automatic replies, a website and call center to the launch date, took us exactly one month - using only Zendesk!”

Agnieszka Kulpinska

Head of Customer Success at Selective Marketplace

Founded

1997

Customer since

2018

Brands

Number of agents and admins

Zendesk support developers

Zendesk Guide developers

Premium womenswear brands

Poetry and Wrap London

UK-based, privately owned, Selective Marketplace has two premium womenswear brands: Poetry and Wrap London. Both brands operate across the UK, USA and Germany.

Poetry has more than two decades under its belt as mail order and eCommerce business. Its first brick-and-mortar stores opened in London in 2016 and 2019. Wrap London currently operates as an eCommerce business, with the brand’s flagship store set to open in London in 2023.

Three challenges that Selective Marketplace needed to solve

Before Selective Marketplace moved to Zendesk in 2018, the company used a range of tools and services to provide customer support, including email, outsourced call centers and an outsourced web team. However, as the business evolved and expanded, the team began to see challenges in three key areas:

1) Email overwhelm and crashing mailboxes

Before Selective Marketplace moved to Zendesk, the company used shared Outlook mailboxes to handle customers’ emails. However, as the customer base grew, the volume of emails increased. “Our mailboxes couldn’t cope with the number of emails we were getting. The shared mailboxes in Outlook were crashing, and there was often a backlog of requests,” says Agnieszka Kulpinska, Head of Customer Success at Selective Marketplace.

2) No way to implement quick website updates

Another issue for the Selective Marketplace team was that they had no way of making quick website changes. For example, when they wanted to update FAQs on the website, they had to contact their outsourced web team to schedule the changes.

3) Outsourcing to call centers in different time zones

Before implementing Zendesk, customer calls to Poetry and Wrap London were outsourced to separate call centers located in different time zones. Working with different call center providers meant that consistency could be a challenge. Customers experienced varying standards of support and the company didn’t have the level of control that it wanted.

Leveraging Zendesk to consolidate customer support

The team at Selective Marketplace were keen to address the challenges they were experiencing and began looking for solutions. They were particularly interested in starting their own UK-based call center, so that they could support their customers across the UK, US and Germany from just one location.

Given the challenge of opening our own contact center, I worked from home for a week Agnieszka recalls. “I returned on Monday with our first functional UK phone line ready to take calls. That was just the start. Four months later, we were covering the US market, alone, independently, no new phone systems from BT needed, no further contracts, no desk phones, just Zendesk Talk.”

The company’s issues with website updates were also solved. Instead of relying on their outsourced web team to implement website changes, the admin team uses Zendesk Guide to make updates themselves. “It was a complete revolution in how we used our web team before Zendesk and how we do it now. We don’t wait anymore for things to be changed for us online – we do it ourselves,” says Agnieszka.

Three-quarters of enquiries come via telephone

For Poetry and Wrap London customers, reliable call center support is a key component of the whole experience journey. Three-quarters (75%) of enquiries for both brands come through the phone lines. “So, that shows you, even in such a digitalized era, customers still rely more on this communication channel, and you simply need to adapt to it,” says Agnieszka. “And this is where Zendesk comes in handy, because it provides you with the phone numbers if you don’t want to port the old ones. You can compose your own interactive voice recordings, split the calls by type and route them to the relevant agents. Call routing is very important to us because we need to ensure that calls from Germany are diverted to our in-house German-speaking team.”

Zendesk’s insights and reporting have helped the company make informed decisions. “Of course, all decisions in terms of planning and which direction to go with the business are backed up with reports from Zendesk GoodData and Zendesk Explore – which, for someone like me with a background in economics and statistics, is an irreplaceable source of information,” says Agnieszka.

Digging into the metrics: How Zendesk has improved CX for Selective Marketplace

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a key measure of success for Selective Marketplace, and the company has achieved a score of 97% since using Zendesk. In terms of resolution times, 79% of queries are resolved within five hours, 9% within 24 hours and 11% within seven days. The company’s service level agreement (SLA) achievement rate is 94%.

Since implementing Zendesk, Agnieszka has noticed a significant improvement in customer satisfaction. “You can really see it in the emails, how the tone of the customers changed from being very frustrated due to waiting times to calling us just to say, how great Agent X or Agent Y was – that simply warms my heart.”