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CUSTOMER STORIES
COMPANY
Hickies is a footwear accessories company producing a no-tie shoelace alternative
WEBSITE
https://uk.hickies.eu/
HEADQUARTERS
USA
INDUSTRY
Footwear
SELLING PLATFORMS
Amazon, Shopify, Own website
SOLUTIONS
eDesk, Repricer
CUSTOMER SINCE
2017
SWITCHED FROM
Zendesk
Gaston Frydlewski always felt there was a better way to tie his shoes, so in 2012, he founded Hickies, a stretchy alternative to shoelaces. Today, Hickies high-performance elastic “laces” are sold in over 50 countries around the world, including the U.S., Argentina, Japan and the U.K. They sell on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and on their Shopify website.
Virginia Roldan, Customer Service Manager
Hickies felt that their current customer support solution was stifling growth and they found themselves needing a more streamlined customer support solution to effectively cater to their growing global customer base. With Zendesk, It was difficult for them to see if a support ticket was coming from the U.S., Europe or Asia, or even what channel it was coming from. They also couldn’t reply directly from some channels and the option to forward a message to another team member was not very user-friendly. Not to mention, a growing business meant an expanding customer support team, and Virginia quickly realized that training new hires to use Zendesk was taking too long because the system was so complex. Difficulties with training often resulted in support tickets being missed, an oversight Hickies couldn’t afford as they tried to grow their business.
“Every time a new agent joined the team, he or she needed to get familiarized with Zendesk and because it’s not very user-friendly, there would always be issues and we would miss tickets.”
Hickies realized that the ability to respond to queries quickly was critical to customer relationship building. A slow response – or worse, no response at all – built distrust, hurting the brand’s reputation and future sales. Additionally, Hickies needed a customer support solution that preserved the human element in their interactions with customers.
They also wanted to offer complete transparency to their customers when resolving issues in order to foster stronger relationships. Having centralized visibility over customer order details, including shipping information, was crucial to providing accurate responses, quickly.
After weighing the pros and cons of other solutions on the market, the company realized a connected ecommerce help desk was the answer. Ultimately, that’s why Hickies made the switch from Zendesk to eDesk.
“Since we are growing a lot, we really need a platform that works, that has different types of eCommerce-focused features and that can easily be used by our customer service team.”
Connectivity was one of the main features that caught the attention of the IT team. Having their customer and order information within once central view was really useful and it helped agents to manage their time and prioritize support tickets.
SLA trackers and message rules ensure Susie’s team are handling tickets effectively.
The auto-translation feature gives the support team the ability to communicate in every language. Most of Hickies’ sales come from its own ecommerce site that services six different regions: the U.S., UK, Brazil, Germany, France and the EU at large. That means the support team has to field queries from customers in all of those markets, potentially written in different languages.
Another favored feature was auto-assign and pre-built templates. After all, collaboration is key to answering queries quickly and Hickies’ agents streamline their support queue by assigning the relevant agent to each ticket and sharing the workload.
Since adopting eDesk, Hickies have seen a major improvement in their customer service operations due to a combination of connected features helping Virginia and her team to provide excellent eCommerce customer service.
One feature the support team found beneficial was eDesk’s user-friendly dashboard which has reduced time spent figuring out which tickets need to be prioritized. Tickets can now be prioritized based on SLA target, channel and more.
Hickies also found eDesk’s integration with Shopify particularly helpful in cutting down response times.
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