Challenge
When you’re a big retailer operating across several markets, it’s difficult to provide excellent customer service. Customers expect 24/7 access to customer support in their language. And that’s especially true when you decide to switch your focus to online retailing. Focusing on ecommerce means providing a better online experience overall. And the best way to do that is to provide excellent online customer service. Giesswein is a great example of a large retailer that decided to double down on the ecommerce side of their business with great success. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t face some issues.
The main problem? Giesswein operates in 17 different markets with different time zones and in 13 different languages. And they aren’t stopping there.
At first, they provided customer support exclusively via email. Yet, they soon realized that to provide robust 24/7 support, they’d need more channels and a better overall support solution. Giesswein had 3 goals when it came to improving their online customer service:
- Provide 24/7 online support across all markets and languages.
- Decrease the number of requests handled via email.
- Decrease wait times for customer service responses.
Their solution? Giesswein was already using Zendesk for customer support, so a simple plug & play connection with Zowie was enough to start automating their customer service. Here are the results:
- Zowie recognized 71% of requests in 2 weeks for Giesswein.
- Zowie recognized 89% of requests in 3 months for Giesswein.
- Zowie provided Immediate 24/7 support in 13 languages across 17 markets.
“Our rapid growth was presenting problems, especially in staffing. We knew that there had to be an AI-powered solution that would allow us to grow while maintaining high customer service standards. That’s how we found Zowie.”
— Markus Giesswein, CEO
Giesswein Looks for Solution to Provide 24/7 Customer Support
Until recently, Giesswein provided customer service using only one channel of communication. Their team was using Zendesk to answer around ten thousand daily customer service requests via email.
These requests were coming from thousands of customers speaking different languages spread across 17 different markets and their corresponding time zones.
When Giesswein decided to go all in on ecommerce, they realized that the growth involved demanded even more from their customer service team. It was clear they needed to throw in 24/7 support across all markets. Email wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
They needed a cost-effective solution that would allow them to scale. They knew that recruiting more agents during such fast-paced growth wasn’t going to work. Plus, hiring a local team would require finding people who could handle multiple languages and work all hours of the day.
That’s when they turned to Zowie to automate their customer service efforts.
“As a manufacturing company, we recognize the value of automation and scalability, even when applied to other processes like sales and customer support.”
— Markus Giesswein, CEO
Giesswein Achieves a 65% Resolution Rate with Zowie
The first step was to connect Giesswein’s Zendesk operations to Zowie through a simple one-click integration. Within three months, Zowie understood an incredible 89% of customer service requests, and today resolves over 65% of all customer questions.
Right from the beginning, Zowie’s automation meant that fewer tickets were going to human agents, allowing them to concentrate on more complex issues.
Another one-click connection to Shopify activated automations across all Giesswein’s domains on the platform. Zowie automated all requests relating to order status, shipment tracking, and the resolution of errors relating to shipping confirmations.
“Zowie gives us the ability to offer customer service 24/7, something we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.“
— Markus Giesswein, CEO
Customer Service Automation is the Key to Ecommerce Success
When you’re juggling multiple markets, languages, and time zones, automation is a necessity, not a nice-to-have. And that’s especially true when you’re an ecommerce retailer. Customers expect seamless 24/7 support across multiple channels.
Zowie helps companies like Giesswein achieve the kind of automated, quality customer service that is essential in today’s competitive ecommerce marketplace and expected by consumers.
Automation has delivered cost efficiencies for Giesswein, a better experience for customers and a better working environment for their customer service team.
Want to see how Zowie can deliver the same benefits for you? Book a demo today and start thinking about happier customers, a more effective customer service team and cost advantages in your business!
“As our ecommerce presence grew, we quickly realized that about 80% of the questions we received were simple and repetitive while about 20% required some extra investigation on our end. It was an ideal situation to deploy a tool that would allow us to automate the responses to that 80%.”
— Markus Giesswein, CEO