Tickets per Month
15,000+
Total Brands on Zendesk
8
Overall Customer Satisfaction
87%
Branded Help Centers
7
Products Used
āWe have a Ferrari, but weāre just using it to drive down the road to buy some milk.ā
This was the analogy Luke Wallace used when he first dug into The Cotton On Groupās online customer service teamās use of Zendesk support.
The team had been using Support for nearly three years to provide email support to seven brands that fall under The Cotton On Group, plus a philanthropic arm, the Cotton On Foundation. But with requests coming in around the clock, and without visibility into what other teams were doing, the team was neck deep in inquiries from the different brands and regions, and it was challenging to make improvements.
Wallace, a digital product manager, explained, āWe already had a really good, fast car, but we needed to learn to drive it appropriately and to start using all the functionality that is available.ā
Established in 1991, The Cotton On Group now employs 22,000 people and operates over 1,700 retail stores in 20 countries, in addition to their online business. Along the way, it made sense to separate customer service between the in-store and online experiences and to move tickets between support teams around the world, chasing the sun. But today the company faces the same challenge as other major retailers: how to unify information in real-time across stores, platforms, corporate departments, and vast geographic distances.
Thatās why The Cotton On Group decided to expand their use of Support to more departmentsāacross the U.S., Australia, and Singapore. Itās a perfect example of ācottoning onāāwhich means to understand or discover the potential of a great idea, exactly what the companyās brands are all about.
To that end, they became early adopters of Zendesk Supportās Multibrand feature. While each brand maintains autonomy, especially when it comes to their social media support, being able to manage multiple brands through a single instance of Support has allowed for a more uniform customer experience.
āWeāve had to review our structure and our definitions of customer service,ā Wallace explained. The reality of todayās landscape is that for every one customer, there are multiple teams theyāll interact with. Thatās why the company is actively aligning their teams to respond to āany customer, anytime, anyhow,ā with extra emphasis on being able to quickly respond in the channel the customer used. Theyāve found that being attentive to social media has been key, but also that each brandās demographicsāand social channel of choiceāare very different.
The Enterprise planās Multibrand feature helps avoid the creation of new silos of customer service.
Multibrand has been key in helping to avoid the creation of new silos of customer service. The company currently has seven help centers, all using the same template, yet customized for each brand. The company also has new automations in place to help triage tickets within and between departmentsāformerly a very manual process. āZendesk Support is really user-friendly software for configuring your workflow with triggers and automations,ā Wallace said. āAutomations have enabled us to run a tighter ship.ā
The biggest win for The Cotton On Group is having a single view of customer service across the group. Wallace can now report back to the business the entire teamās performance across all channels and brands in one snapshot, but can also give managers an accurate view of their individual teams. āThey can go in each morning and pinpoint issues, and start asking the right questions,ā he said.
From headquarters in North Geelong, Australia, Wallace also appreciates that Multibrand has eliminated the need to make updates on each brandās instance of Support. He no longer has to worry about introducing errors on the seventh iteration of an automation. āTo have everything up and running in one instance just makes the way we operate so much easier,ā he said.
Returning to the Ferrari analogy, no one drives a Ferrari like an expert without a few lessons or at least a lot of practice.
āSupport has been really easy to use and the team easy to work with,ā Wallace said. āI can ring up our account manager at any time and heās always good for a chat. The time heās spent getting us up and running has paid dividends, and now Iām an advanced Support user.ā
