Auctane building personalized customer journeys

From the smallest Etsy sellers to the largest global companies, modern businesses rely on quick and seamless shipping to keep customers happy. Auctane is trusted by one million merchants to fulfill their delivery requirements and bring great shipping experiences to 500 million households every year.

The Texas-based company offers a portfolio of 11 global brands and products, including Stamps.com, ShipStation, Packlink, ShippingEasy, and GlobalPost. Each year, Auctane’s team of shipping and software experts process around 3 billion orders, working from offices in the United States, England, Spain, and Poland.

“Our organizational design is built around verticals tied to each major step of the customer journey,” explains Chris Karp, Chief Customer Officer at Auctane. “There’s implementation, North America support, rest of world support, and customer success. We also have key support functions managing our operations team that handles workforce management, along with QA learning and development.”

Unifying CX to break down silos

Auctane’s complex ecosystem calls for a flexible tech stack that can easily be integrated to help connect teams and break down silos. But currently, there are different brands using multiple platforms, including Zendesk, Oracle Service Cloud, and Salesforce.

The goal is to integrate everyone under the Zendesk umbrella, standardize operations, and drive consistency across all brands. Auctane also plans to limit its third-party platforms to a large extent.

“All of our technology decisions are built around future proofing as much as possible,” notes Karp. “Zendesk has been a huge help in developing our digital transformation strategy and assessing our priorities.” Auctane has been leveraging Zendesk since 2015 and the omnichannel system continues to play a vital role in creating an exceptional end-to-end CX journey.

Auctane currently handles around 252,000 monthly tickets through API, email, phone, chat, and social messaging. The team just added Sunshine Conversations and will soon be moving from chat to messaging in an effort to decrease phone and email traffic. With 350 agents on a pool model for licenses, Auctane can easily expand staffing for the holiday and peak shipping seasons.

Personalized customer experiences at scale

The team strives to create a seamless experience across brands, a huge job for a company with two million B2B and B2C customers. “Every customer, regardless of whether it’s an individual, an SMB, or an enterprise business, wants the same thing: support that is responsive, solves the issue at hand, and anticipates their future needs,” explains Karp.

His team is laser-focused on providing exceptional service, while also supporting Auctane’s plan to grow by 25 percent through mergers and acquisitions.

“The main challenge is figuring out how to deliver a one-size-fits-one experience to millions of customers, across millions of interactions, and make every one of them feel personalized,” Karp says. “I want to be able to use historical customer persona information to customize their experience, while doing it at scale across every channel. That’s how we’re leveraging Zendesk.”

Happy agents equal happy customers

In a previous CX role at Chewy.com, Karp learned that creating happy customers starts with happy employees. “It’s critical that agents have the autonomy to surprise and delight,” says Karp. “The more you empower the team, the more they will be invested in the overall mission. Our focus right now is on the agent experience as an input, and the customer experience as an output.”

As a rapidly growing organization with new agents starting almost daily, Auctane is prioritizing the agent experience through onboarding. The company also sets a cutoff date for hiring in peak season to ensure that there’s time to provide quality training and set employees up for success.

“We want them to feel part of the culture, that their work is meaningful, and that they have a career and development path,” Karp shares. “If you don’t have a motivated and engaged workforce that wants to deliver an exceptional experience, you’re never going to achieve great customer support.”

Gaining executive buy-in with powerful CX data

Karp also has a clear vision of how to elevate the role of support at Auctane, starting with greater data visibility. Zendesk gives his team the ability to collect and analyze CX data, which helps them create better experiences and drive retention.

“When we empower agents with the right information, we can identify churn risk ahead of time,” Karp adds. “If an agent sees a negative NPS or CSAT, that can kick off a conversation with the customer to find out how we can help.” The team also shares out KPI wins, including a current one-touch resolution rate of 79 percent and a median first reply time of just over one hour.

The goal is to show the executive team that support can be a revenue growth center, rather than a cost center. “We want our organization to not just be reactive, but also proactively use data to inform key stakeholders and drive product direction and upselling strategies,” notes Karp. “Those insights are the heartbeat of the customer and establish our team as a source of truth within the company.”

Better social media and brand management

When it comes to managing brand reputation, “We put a stake in the ground and decided to respond to every single review, no matter what,” Karp says. “We want to make sure that we reply in minutes and that every single merchant feels seen and heard.”

Auctane created a dedicated Slack channel, a social media listener, and a new social media team to enable immediate responses on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. “Agents are given guidelines and special training on how to respond on a public forum and de-escalate issues,” explains Karp. He also reviews all the negative feedback that gets posted on sites such as TrustPilot, Better Business Bureau, and BigCommerce to learn how the company can do better by their customers. “All of these approaches have helped us tremendously in turning around negative reviews, as well as retaining merchants and creating a new type of support persona.”

A journey of learning with AI

Next, Karp will be outlining a technology map of how all the AI functions from different vendors fit together. “We recently connected ChatGPT to our knowledge base, so we’re on a journey of learning,” he says. The team is also looking to improve self-service, a pivotal step given the help center gets 1 million monthly views.

Auctane is teaming up with Zendesk to build out a digital transformation strategy over the next 18 to 24 months. “Right now, we are willing to be early adopters and figure out what impact it can have for us and the service industry,” adds Karp. He’s optimistic that investing in automations and AI will help Auctane increase their bottom line and attract more customers.

“My view isn’t that AI is going to replace people, but that the companies that learn how to use it will increase their resolution speed, deliver better information to agents in real-time, and eventually outpace the competition,” Karp says.

Zendesk as a strategic ‘ride or die’ partner

Auctane is teed up for success with powerful tools and a team of CX experts. “Zendesk is our CRM platform. But more importantly, Zendesk has become a strategic thought partner and is actively engaged in helping us assess every aspect of our business,” says Karp. “They not only help us configure the technology, but also share best practices on how to run our support organization successfully.”

Despite using Salesforce at a previous job and occasionally receiving outreach calls, Karp will not be swayed. “Zendesk is challenging our thinking and becoming a ‘ride or die’ partner,” he says. “I wouldn’t change the relationship that we’re building with Zendesk for anyone.”