Sustainable fashion retailer Selective Marketplace consistently achieves a 95-100% Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score. It’s no coincidence that as a business, their effort is focused on customer happiness and creating a positive contact center environment for the team.
We spoke with Head of Customer Experience, Patricia Limb, who talked us through how they have such happy customers and staff.
We still send out catalogs and our customers like to talk to people for advice and information on sizing. About 80% of our inbound calls are customers wanting to buy something. We’re very focused on providing great customer service so it’s a really positive environment.
Patricia manages a team of 30+ customer service agents. The contact center operates in two shifts to cover UK, European and US time zones. It’s a long day, starting at 8.30am, ending at 10.30pm.
The contact center team uses Zendesk Talk to handle calls and Zendesk Guide for customer service content and Patricia’s really happy with how it works for them. Using Zendesk Explore she’s able to run regular reports and drill down into specific issues. Her agents also use Zendesk to track their weekly and monthly performance.
However, when setting up TVs for live data within the contact center, they needed a better solution. Zendesk’s data wasn’t real-time enough and it was tricky to configure into TV dashboards.
The contact center is very busy, so they needed a quick and simple solution that would allow them to give the agents transparency of their team metrics.
It’s important that this team is able to see the workload when they come in for their shift and to know the status of their peers (who’s online, who’s on calls).
This is where Geckoboard comes in.
With Geckoboard, Patricia has four TV dashboards around the contact center that have been created with data transparency in mind.
Whole team metrics such as current workload, CSAT ratings and Agent status are displayed for everyone to see.
The dashboards have become a habitual part of the day for the agents. They arrive for their shift, check the TV and see what the workload looks like. They get to lunchtime, want to take a break and check the TV to see if there are enough agents available to handle the call volumes coming in.
The dashboard creates transparency for the team and autonomy for the agents. It helps them to figure things out by themselves, removes unnecessary communication and avoids micromanagement.
We have status indicators that will alert red or green to let the team know if we’re hitting certain targets or not. They’re able to manage the work themselves because they can see where they’re needed.
Patricia’s team isn't tightly focused on KPIs, customer effort is the most important thing within the contact center. If someone’s on a long call with a customer, they aren’t hurried off the phone. The opposite, they’re encouraged to take time to make sure the customer has all the information they need.
We used to have the number of calls taken by individual agents on the screens. But we saw the call quality drop dramatically because people were trying to get to the top, to do more work. The quality of service wasn't the same so we removed it.
Not every business is able to do that, but thankfully, we are. And that's why we get such good feedback from our customers, because it's just so important that they come first.
Because of the people-first environment created within the contact center, Selective Marketplace has great staff retention, the customers are happy and the business wins!
Would you like to set up contact center dashboards for your agents? Try Geckoboard for 14 days free.
