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Challenge

ModCloth first opened shop from a college dorm room. Today, the online retailer of vintage-inspired fashion and decor has almost 300 employees and has served over one million customers. Like any growing business, there’s always a tipping point where a small business is no longer small anymore, and there needs to be some change in order to scale. For ModCloth’s customer care team, they were not satisfied with their manual support process or with their ability to meet the growing volume of customer interactions. They needed a solution that could efficiently manage their customer conversations, shorten response times and integrate with their existing tools.

Zendesk as a solution

In evaluating customer service software, ModCloth set up a trial in Zendesk and four other comparable software solutions. Zendesk met all the requirements on their wishlist. “We couldn’t believe how easy and resource-free it was to start using Zendesk and how quickly we were able to make this change within our support team. Zendesk is cost-effective, feature-rich and easily customizable,” Customer Care Manager Audrey Griffith said.

Here’s how ModCloth is using Zendesk to have more visibility into their customer interactions and business:

• More productive workflows: With a third of support requests related to returns, the customer care team uses macros (aka pre-defined responses) to respond to these FAQs faster. Their Zendesk has over 30 custom views to help organize support tickets and over 30 triggers set up to make sure requests get routed to the right people.
• Tracking ticket trends: Tagging tickets is easy in Zendesk so it makes searching through ticket archives a breeze. Also, tagging makes tracking types of tickets easier which has improved ModCloth’s QA process where they help coach and develop the support team based on customer needs and ticket trends.
• Integrated channels and tools: Integrating their Twitter channel @ModCloth_Cares, along with both email and web channels, has allowed the customer care team to increase response times tremendously, as they now route all twickets to a special group of social support agents. They’ve also integrated their Zendesk with tools like Sprout Social for social media monitoring, LiveChat as their preferred chat software, GoodData for robust performance analytics, and several others.
• Turning learnings into actions: Based on the FAQs the customer care team receives, ModCloth’s advertising team is working to create informative banner ads that are displayed on various www.modcloth.com pages to educate customers on these common questions and deflect support requests.

Results

With Zendesk, ModCloth has achieved:

• 20% increase in agent productivity with 457 solved tickets per month per agent
• 96% of all tickets answered at first touch
• Decreased first response times from 37 hours to 7 hours within 7 months, with today’s average response time at 5.3 hours
• 20% reduction in support costs
• Average customer satisfaction rating of 94%, well above the retail industry benchmark of 82%

Going beyond the numbers, Zendesk has enabled ModCloth to focus on their customer service mission rather than wrestle with complex tools. “We strive to be the best e-retail service center on the planet. So we give our support agents the freedom to do what they want with customers. We are able to empower them to make the best decision because they are armed with a combination of tools that includes Zendesk,” Griffith said.