Coco Republic elevates luxury service with Contact Center

For Coco Republic, luxury isn’t just about beautiful furniture—it’s about building enduring trust with its customers.

“Our brand is really based on relationships,” says Christine Polson, Chief Operating Officer at Coco Republic.

As the company expanded across Australia and New Zealand, delivering that relationship-driven customer experience became increasingly difficult. Behind the scenes, customer service relied on disconnected systems and an outsourced contact center.

Coco Republic ended their relationship with the offshore customer service program, turning to Zendesk Contact Center to unite their disconnected systems. Now, the company has control of their data which drives its signature white glove, personalized service.

Faster service builds stronger relationships

“The biggest change has been simplicity and visibility,” Michael Pagano, Customer Experience Manager at Coco Republic, says. “Zendesk Contact Center allows us to focus on the conversation rather than the admin.”

With a unified contact center in place, Coco Republic reduced average handling time by 60 percent while cutting customer wait times from more than an hour to just 30 seconds—a 99.2 percent reduction. Since 2024, the team has also reduced the call abandonment rate by 88 percent—from 41.5 percent in 2024—to just 5 percent in 2026.

“Now, we can actually be on the front foot with our customers,” Polson says. “We can see and preempt what might be happening with an individual client.”

Maintaining a premium standard at scale

Zendesk Quality Assurance (QA) helps managers coach agents while ensuring every interaction reflects Coco Republic’s premium tone.

“It’s personal, it’s empathetic, and it’s never transactional,” Pagano says.

The results are reflected in Coco Republic’s improved Net Promoter Score (NPS).

“NPS is our future sales and our future revenue,” Polson says. “When we see growth in revenue and growth in NPS, then we know that’s the pivot we want to take.”

AI supports the human touch

While Coco Republic has embraced AI, the company sees it as a way to strengthen—not replace—the human experience.

“AI is actually teaching our team members how to service better,” Polson says.
Instead of putting AI directly in front of customers, Coco Republic uses

Zendesk AI behind the scenes to improve coaching, efficiency, and decision-making—all while preserving human empathy and personalization.

Building a connected experience with a modern contact center

Before Zendesk, customer service agents spent as much time searching for information as they did helping customers.

“It was a lot of jumping between different platforms,” Pagano says. “There was no single point of truth.”

To deliver white-glove service across time zones and regions, Coco Republic required crystal-clear call quality and resilient cloud infrastructure. Zendesk Contact Center natively integrates Amazon Connect Customer, AWS’s industry-leading telephony platform directly into the Zendesk Resolution Platform.

This provides Coco Republic with enterprise-grade reliability and global scale under the hood, while agents work seamlessly inside a single, intuitive workspace without system switching. Agents can now resolve issues faster because every call, ticket, and customer interaction lives in one unified record.

A single view of the customer

Zendesk has also broken down barriers between Coco Republic’s showrooms and customer service teams.

“Before Zendesk, customers often needed to repeat themselves, which wasn’t as premium as we would like the interaction to be,” Pagano says.

To solve that challenge, Coco Republic piloted Zendesk in its Canberra showroom, giving showroom employees visibility into live chats and customer tickets.

With everyone working from the same customer record, showroom teams and customer service agents now share a complete view of each customer relationship. Agents are no longer just answering calls—they are managing client relationships and identifying opportunities to deliver more proactive service.

“They don’t even have to ring up or check in, ‘Can I do this?’ They just know that they can fix it for their clients,” Polson says. “Whatever happens for them—the truck’s late, something’s broken—we will always fix it for them.”

A foundation for what’s next

Coco Republic is also integrating Zendesk with its enterprise resource planning (ERP), surfacing order and transaction data inside customer conversations while automating claims processing.

As Coco Republic expands its ERP integrations, agents spend less time searching for information and more time helping customers.

“Modern customer service isn’t just about answering calls,” Pagano says. “It’s about having the right information, in the right place, at the right time.”

With Zendesk Contact Center as the foundation of its customer experience, Coco Republic is continuing to expand its use of AI and connected data to continue to build the relationships that define its brand.

“Zendesk has really opened our eyes and our ears to the customer,” Polson says. “We actually feel like they’re sitting next to us.”