"It's key to Showpo's success": Here's how we significantly reduced our customer contact ratio

As an online retailer, Showpo aims to provide a fast and seamless ecommerce customer experience. A sign of success is a low percentage of customers needing to contact us for help.

In April, a new project began to tackle this number, known as the contact ratio. With the enthusiastic collaboration of multiple teams, including the customer happiness team, operations and tech, we managed to cut it down by 50% in just a few months.

Our Head of DC & Operations David Ibanez, Customer Happiness Manager Patricia Theodorou and Chief Technology Officer Lachlan Smith took five to discuss why this project was important to Showpo and how they and their teams pulled it off.

To start, what is your title and what do you do at Showpo?

D: I am David, the Head Of DC & Operations. My role is to make the warehouse and supply chain run efficiently and smoothly, and to provide the best service possible to our customers.

P: My name is Patricia! I’m the Customer Happiness Manager at Showpo. In a nutshell, my role is to ensure the customer experience is seamless while shopping with Showpo!

L: Hey I’m Lachlan, I am the CTO at Showpo. I am responsible for all things digital product and engineering at Showpo. This includes the website, mobile apps, and all the backend systems required to keep our orders flowing and our customers happy.

Since April our customer contact ratio has dropped significantly - a huge win! Can you summarise what problem you were resolving here and why it was important for Showpo?

P: While we do aim for a seamless experience, there are occasions where customers need to reach out for an extra hand with things that may not be working quite right.?

With the help from our internal customer happiness team (CHT) as well as support from our tech dream team, we were able to determine areas to focus on and review to create the best possible experience for our customers.?

D: Before going into it, we need to understand what the contact ratio means for Showpo. CHT records each interaction with a customer. We then divide the number of interactions inside a timeframe by the number of orders in the same timeframe. That is our ratio.

At Showpo we take the tickets received by CHT extremely seriously. They measure not only customer satisfaction and retention, but also help us provide feedback on trends or realise underlying issues.?

We must appreciate any feedback given by our customers, good and bad, and value the time and effort spent on raising the issues. A customer provides feedback because they care; if they do have a problem and they do not raise it, that is a customer lost.

L: It’s a problem best described as many tiny problems across many areas all adding up into a poor customer experience, resulting in a high customer contact ratio and ultimately leading to a poor customer retention.?

Fixing this is paramount to the happiness of our customers, and is key to Showpo’s success as an online fashion retailer.

How did you identify the parameters of the problem and the specific areas you would target?

L: Customers and data!!! As Patricia said, customers are great! They love to help and a lot of key indicators come from customer feedback. Every contact, every reachout and every return reason is compiled, categorised and reported on.?

P: I report on reasons for customer contact, which are then shared with our executive and management teams weekly. Through this, I review and reflect on what our customers are saying each week, and work on deep diving into these enquiries with our tech, product and other teams to determine our next focus area.?

L: In engineering and digital product, we have access to so much data that without areas of focus, it’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.?

Once Patricia gave us an indication of the problem areas, we could then start cross referencing this with order and delivery data, product information, site statistics and log files to identify root causes.?

D: We take the data reported by CHT, split those tickets per category, and perform a root cause analysis on each of the categories. We then look at the owner of each of the processes. They could be in tech, operations, product, carriers etc.

We also pay attention to other customer satisfaction inputs like NPS (our customer satisfaction survey), DIFOT (our delivery performance measurement), and our RTS (return-to-shipper) and returns processes to check the root cause, check the data that supports the issue and act on resolving the problem.

Once you identified some key focus areas and root causes for this project, what were your next steps?

P: In terms of tackling problem areas, myself, David, Lachlan, and Hayley from the digital product team meet weekly to discuss any new findings, current tasks the team are working on, and our next focus area.

L: When the main areas of concern were identified for this project, it was time to start solving the actual problems. This is where the meetings that Patricia mentioned were key. Solutions are often best derived from having as much information from all parts of the business.

Focus areas were broken down into smaller problems which were then brainstormed into solutions. Solutions were then broken down into tasks, and tasks grouped into small deliverables. The smaller and quicker we could deliver, the quicker we could address customer issues, and the faster we’d get feedback.

D: An example would be checking a return-to-sender parcel delivered by the couriers. The operations team gets the parcel back, and CHT gets the refund request. We then look at the main reasons for the return, and the cost it’s having for the company. After checking, we discover there were multiple reasons it could’ve happened: the customer entered the wrong address, the wrong address was validated, emojis were entered in the address, etc.

We then action improvement plans in the operation, we ask our partners for feedback and improvements, or we ask if possible to make changes inside our tech space. If agreed, we implement the improvements and look at the results, then we implement other changes.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork: Pictured below, Head of DC & Operations David Ibanez, Customer Happiness Manager Patricia Theodorou and CTO Lachlan Smith

What are some key signs of success for a project like this?

P: We deployed an upgraded version of Zendesk, our customer service software, and literally saw a decrease in contacts that day!?

We found customers were able to locate answers on their own, with our new AI bot providing instant replies to our FAQs and sharing our help centre articles with a little more info where needed.?

L: As Patricia indicated, since we were data-led and had the metrics in place, it was very easy to see if the metrics were moving in the right direction.?

We’d use this fairly instant feedback after each new release for our platforms to help us correlate ideas, as well as easily see if we need to do more, or it was time to move onto another focus area. It also gave us an indication of how we were progressing.

How do you think teams worked together effectively to achieve this win??

L: Feedback was key. By constantly looking at our metrics and constantly digging into the new data and customer feedback, we were able to continuously find ways to improve the customer experience and reduce the contact ratio.?

Keeping this cycle tight and releasing updates frequently kept moving the needle in the right direction. It also helped us find areas of improvement and efficiency we never thought to look at.?

Do you have any future goals in this area you can talk about?

P: Reducing it even further is definitely our big goal!

L: While we have seen massive improvement over the past few months and even smashed out initial objectives, it doesn’t mean that our work here is done. The customer is always first and foremost. There are always ways to improve the customer journey.?

By keeping the communication channels between the teams open and keeping an eye on our metrics, we can easily detect and catch issues early, as well as improve on issues we currently have.?

D: At Showpo we have this goal to reduce the contact ratio, and it’s a KPI that the whole organisation owns - not only a task that lies on CHT, tech and ops.

Ultimately we want the customer to make a purchase seamlessly without needing to reach out to our CHT. A contact ratio in the single digits is a real possibility for us.

Reducing the number of interactions not only means we reduce the number of issues experienced by customers, but it also frees up time for our CHT to deliver a better customer experience.

Amazing work David, Patricia and Lachlan - thank you!