Achieving excellent customer satisfaction scores in today’s competitive e-commerce landscape isn’t just about serving your consumers wherever they are; it’s also about being able to adapt to unexpected changes whenever they may happen.
While the pandemic had a resounding influence on the evolution of virtually every company over the last couple of years, the e-commerce industry was shaken more than most. For many online retailers, sales increased rapidly, almost overnight. While increased sales also mean higher profits, rapid growth often paves the way for several complex challenges.
Brands like Vivino found themselves facing a massive influx in customer service inquiries. The only way to ensure a continuously positive reputation was for the brand to find a new way of managing customer demands. Fortunately, Talkdesk was on-hand to help.
Here’s how Talkdesk helped Vivino thrive during the pandemic.
Addressing the Challenges of the Pandemic
Vivino, a leading e-commerce company, selling wine to approximately 54 million customers worldwide, has earned a positive reputation with its customers over the years. The company is best-known for selling a host of affordable, high-quality drinks from regions all over the world. Vivino even has its own subscription box and tools to help customers choose the right wine for every occasion.
Before the pandemic, Vivino was already seeing rapid growth for its online marketplace, thanks to the phenomenal offers provided on the retail cost of various wines. When the pandemic hit, sales began to surge, with consumers looking for ways to maintain a sense of “fun” at home when they could no longer go out with friends.
According to LaNae Rueda, the VP of Global Customer Experience, and Jeff Gorham, the Customer Experience Manager at Vivino, the company tripled its customer service agents to address the rapidly evolving needs of its clients.
Like many companies at the time, Vivino was forced to transition agents across two call centres into a remote working environment during the pandemic. The company said it had around 48 hours to ensure all of its employees were equipped with the tools they needed. Fortunately, because Vivino uses the web-based customer service platform (Talkdesk) to communicate with customers, agents could continue to handle customer service requests with minimal disruptions.
Though the shift to working from home was simple enough for Vivino, new challenges quickly emerged. As more countries went into lockdown, Vivino’s sales grew exponentially, and the existing team felt the pressure mounting.
Dealing with Exponential Growth
Although rapid growth seems like a great problem to have, Rueda said the challenges the team faced were difficult to overcome. When a country or region implemented a new “stay at home” order, the sales for the region immediately began to grow. Wine sales surged in February for Italy, followed by a new surge in the US a month later.
More sales meant more customer service inquiries to handle on a daily basis and more risks of delays for the customer service team. According to Vivino, with no end in sight for the pandemic, they felt the only option was to rapidly increase their headcount to address new demands.
Talkdesk’s cloud contact centre solution allowed Vivino to onboard and train new remote agents quickly and effectively, tripling their team numbers in no time. As sales and customer inquiries continued to rise, Vivino continued to onboard new well-trained agents to handle what amounted to a 60% increase in customer service inquiries.
Having additional employees in place was also extremely useful for Vivino as the holidays arrived. In the past, the company had hired temporary agents in October and provided them with crash-course training to manage the holiday rush. However, Vivino instead decided to maintain the additional agents they had hired earlier in the year, reducing the demand for additional training.
With these seasoned customer service reps already prepared to manage inquiries at speed, Vivino was able to achieve its highest Net Promotor Score ever during the fourth quarter of 2020. The Net Promoter Score, ranked out of 5, was 4.41 at the end of the year.
Empowering Agents for the New Age of Work
The flexible cloud contact centre from Talkdesk enabled Vivino to empower their agents, in an agile and efficient way, to stay on top of changing demands. Agents could even decide which partners to cut out of their marketplace through the contact centre environment. Usually, if a business repeatedly had cancelled orders or delays, it would be removed from the marketplace for the time being.
The flexible environment allowed employees to make intelligent decisions to preserve excellent customer experience. What’s more, a well-managed contact centre meant the company was perfectly equipped to handle the challenges of the biggest sale of the year – Black Friday.
During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the sales for the wine marketplace were 2.6 times higher than in 2019, even with the challenges of the pandemic to think about.
According to Gorham, being able to not only survive the challenges of the pandemic but deliver an experience worthy of a 4.41 NPS was fantastic. Like many companies facing the challenges of the pandemic, Vivino discovered flexibility was key to the brand’s success.
Throughout the pandemic, many e-commerce companies learned just how vital adaptability really is. Thanks to a solid partnership with Talkdesk, Vivino implemented the right technology to react quickly to the challenges presented by COVID-19. The company could take advantage of its fast-tracked growth and survive an unpredictable marketplace.
