As one of the leading flash sale sites for men, JackThreads has quickly expanded its offerings to include its own private-label products and a rich assortment of apparel and accessories for men. Input from fashion experts and detailed content on the latest trends and up-and-coming brands help immerse male shoppers in a world of accessible yet coveted fashion.
However, as more and more men shop JackThreads beyond the flash sale section of the site, the eTailer has worked to revise and continuously improve its contact center, according to Jason Rosser, Head of Customer Service Operations at JackThreads.
“We have a passion for keeping it as an internal experience — not outsourcing it,” said Rosser in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Our service mission is to support loyalty through unique and engaging experiences.”
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The customer service team, which includes call center, email, social and chat representatives, currently is made up of approximately 40 employees, Rosser noted. By the end of 2014, this department is expected to grow to 60 employees.
“Half of our sales now come from areas of the site that are not flash related,” Rosser explained. As more men gravitate to the overall JackThreads brand experience, the more contact center practices have needed to improve.
Customer service and communication options are provided across channels, and the number of inquiries vary by urgency, time of day and type of request. Overall, 40% all service inquiries are through the call center, while 30% are via email, 20% in chat and 10% through social media.
Over the past few years, JackThreads has implemented a series of solutions to ramp up customer service practices, including Conversocial to monitor and respond to social feedback, and Zendesk to organize service inquiries and engage customers through the most effective channel.
“In Zendesk we can prioritize tickets,” Rosser said. “For example, if someone wants to cancel an order they have only 30 minutes to do that. Rather than risk missing that window of time, representatives can make these inquiries urgent so they’re addressed faster.”
JackThreads also has integrated Zendesk with its order management system, which offers customers representatives more context around customers and their recent purchases.
“The power of that is from an analytics perspective, we can combine structured and unstructured data so we know a little bit more about you and why you contacted us,” Rosser explained. Because representatives have a better understanding of customers before the interaction even begins, they are more prone to delivering an excellent service experience. “Strategically, we think taking care of our people will result in them taking better care of our customers.”
Feeding Service Insights Back Into The Business
Data aggregated within the Zendesk platform also helps Rosser and the service team develop detailed reports, which help them improve enterprise-wide processes and initiatives so the JackThreads business can continue to thrive.
“I truly believe that the contact center should be reporting information back to the business to improve the overall experience; it shouldn’t get stuck in the contact center,” Rosser said. “Zendesk gives us excellent insights into what’s going on in our business and why things are happening. We can see what customers are requesting and now we’re using Zendesk satisfaction ratings to identify what customers are asking us to do, see what we’re not doing, and go and fix that experience.”
Because all service inquiries are centralized, the service team can identify trends and generate reports quickly and easily, rather than going through a week-long process to manually collect and analyze data.
“When our general manager would look to us for answers and ask us what guys want, it would be a really long, hard week to pull something out,” Rosser noted. “In Zendesk, we can identify questions being asked most frequently and dive into what they want.”
Rosser predicts that by the end of 2014, email-based interactions will drop dramatically and chat will increase, due to ongoing plans for JackThreads to offer a mobile chat function.
“With our mobile success, we are trying to keep up with supporting the customer,” Rosser said. “More than 45% of revenue is through mobile, and even more of our traffic is via mobile.”
To keep pace with mobile demand, JackThreads is implementing the mobile chat solution from LivePerson. Rosser expects to see an uptick in chat once the process is complete, largely because “we know that synchronous communication with consumers is a lot more powerful than the back and forth of email.”
As part of an extensive roadmap, JackThreads is integrating customer service inquiries across all channels, including social media, into the Zendesk platform. This will help the retailer create more cohesive, 360-degree profiles on customers, which in turn, will empower representatives to improve their service approaches.
“We’re a growing company, so from a support perspective we need to focus on how the contact center supports merchandise and feeds information back into the business,” Rosser said. The ongoing dedication to service excellence, he added, will continue to help JackThreads earn the trust of customers.
“When you win a heart of a guy, they don’t like to switch,” Rosser concluded. “Speaking from my own experiences, if guys find something they like, they just like it. They don’t have to think about it anymore. And from what I hear from our customers, we make it easy for them to connect and engage with us.”
