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How Wetsuit Outlet improved customer response times by 38% with eDesk

With Susie Waghorn, Head of Customer Service, Wetsuit Outlet

5-star

Trustpilot Score

38%

reduction in response time

Zero

assistance required from internal IT team during setup

COMPANY
Wetsuit Outlet is Europe’s largest watersports clothing and equipment supplier.

WEBSITE
www.wetsuitoutlet.co.uk

HEADQUARTERS
Essex, UK

INDUSTRY
Sportswear

SELLING PLATFORMS
Amazon, Custom Website

SOLUTIONS
eDesk

CUSTOMER SINCE
2022

FAVORITE FEATURES
Automations/AI
Centralized Inbox
Insights

WETSUIT OUTLET

Founded in 2004, Wetsuit Outlet is Europe’s largest watersports retailer supplying watersports clothing and equipment to a global customer base. Last year, the business celebrated shipping over 2 million orders since it was established 19 years ago.

.. If you're considering eDesk, you'll see the benefits immediately!

“It’s so easy to integrate, and to have all of your customer queries all in one place from all of the different places that you sell is just a dream […] eDesk has absolutely exceeded my expectations. Everybody that I’ve spoken to in the company has been absolutely fantastic.”

Susie Waghorn, Head of Customer Service at Wetsuit Outlet

THE PROBLEM

Prior to introducing eDesk, Wetsuit Outlet was using home-built systems to manage customer service, with customer tickets, phone systems, and live chat all managed independently. The team often relied on the IT team to fix issues, which occurred quite often.

When Susie first joined Wetsuit Outlet as the Customer Service Manager, she recognized a serious need for change. Without a central customer service solution, the team lacked the ability to effectively assign tickets to the most suitable agent or even record ticket response time. In fact, there were virtually no analytics available, which made it difficult to drive any improvements.

“…My team would actually record the amount of emails they did on a daily basis. To get a general gist of what our customers were talking about, I’d ask my team at the end of the week if they recognized any customer trends or reasons for contact that week.”

Susie Waghorn

Head of Customer Service, Wetsuit Outlet

As a business selling across multiple marketplaces, this lack of centralization made it almost impossible to effectively manage various marketplace SLAs. This was a huge problem, as non-compliance could have a detrimental impact on sales revenue.

Susie’s top priorities were to increase customer satisfaction and boost customer acquisition and retention. To achieve this, Susie knew she needed to focus on two key areas: reducing ticket response time and offering fantastic product knowledge. With current systems hindering growth, Susie sought out a customer service solution that could support these objectives and scale with their business as they grew and evolved.

Example of using snippets to personalize templates – one of Susie’s favorite features.

THE SOLUTION

One of Susie’s core requirements for a new solution was a unified inbox where her team could access all customer conversations across all channels from one centralized location. 

Experiencing the simplicity of eDesk during the 14-day trial cemented Susie’s decision to switch. With no assistance required from the IT department to integrate eDesk, Susie could get started immediately. And in terms of features, eDesks auto-translate functionality is what made it a winner for Susie, as she failed to come across a competing solution that offered auto-translation on tickets and live chat.

With eDesk, Susie can now manage her team of 7 English speakers and 5 international speakers more efficiently. The business receives a lot of European orders, and with auto-translate, they no longer need to worry about language barriers impacting customer experience.

“The tickets are automatically translated in their inboxes and auto-translated responses go back to our customers. You wouldn’t even see the difference, if it was a German email coming through, I would see that in English.”

Aside from auto-translate, Susie can now set her own SLAs within eDesk depending on the query type or channel. And with queries from their webstore and marketplaces now centralized, SLAs are much easier to manage.  Tickets can be assigned to specific agents so Susie can be sure the most qualified support rep is handling each type of customer query. This has made training new staff a lot easier.

SLA trackers and message rules ensure Susie’s team are handling tickets effectively.

Using eDesk’s message rules, Susie can assign basic query categories to new customer service agents. And, as agents progress through training, the rules can be altered to introduce more complex query categories.  As Wetsuit Outlet has grown, customer service has gotten a lot busier. By creating bespoke message templates for various query types and using message snippets to insert customer-specific information, Susie and her team have been able to manage the increased workload with ease.

Susie also enjoyed a smooth onboarding process. Having never introduced an omnichannel support solution into a business before, Susie had a lot of questions, and it wasn’t long before she got the answers!

“The whole onboarding experience at eDesk was so easy! My account manager in particular, Aaron, was absolutely fantastic. I had loads of questions, and I would have responses within a few hours. They would always jump on a call with me.”

THE RESULT

Susie and her team have achieved a remarkable reduction of up to 38% in response times since implementing eDesk. Additionally, adopting eDesk has improved customer satisfaction as evidenced by their 5-star Trustpilot score.

eDesk has created greater efficiency for Susie and her team, providing accurate analytics that enable her to enhance quality control and communicate valuable insights to the wider business for process improvement. 

With its centralized and well-integrated setup, adopting eDesk has also made the customer service team less reliant on their internal IT department when it comes to system issues. 

Overall, eDesk has had a tremendously beneficial impact for Wetsuit Outlet, helping the brand improve customer service processes, response times, customer satisfaction, and more, all while saving loads of time and effort.

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