Forest Essentials improves first-call response 66% with Freshdesk

About Forest Essentials

Forest Essentials is a pioneer in the Luxury Ayurveda segment – a quintessential Indian skincare and wellness brand, with over 90 stores across all major cities in India. It is the only Indian skincare brand, of this scale, which does conception, formulation, manufacturing, bottling, and sale of products in its company-owned units.

Customer-centricity is key to Forest Essentials, and handling their queries the right way is a mandate for them. The majority of queries are often related to delivery and shipping, and about a third are on product consultation, including customers seeking help with skin issues and guidance to buy the right products.

Customer Service Vision at Forest Essentials

Abdullah Qureshi, who heads the Customer Support Team at Forest Essentials, believes in the philosophy of ‘first call resolution’ within the quickest time frame possible.

Freshdesk enabled the Forest Essentials team to bring this vision to life. Today, Abdullah and his team of agents use Freshdesk as their primary customer support platform. A customer support executive at Forest Essentials remarks, ‘Freshdesk is fantastic’, primarily because of features like ticket history, in-built reports, and grammar checks along with sentiment analysis. 

Now, Forest Essentials has an improved customer query response time - from 72 hours to less than 24 hours. This translates to about 66% improvement in the first call response metric. 

Here’s how they did it!

Getting it right the first time, and each time with Freshdesk

Before Freshdesk, Forest Essentials was using a platform that was not cost-effective and did not provide seamless customer support across channels. Support agents could not find relevant information to answer queries due to the lack of conversational history. This changed with Freshdesk. With the Customer 360 feature of Freshdesk, agents now have complete access to customer interaction across channels, equipping them with the right data needed to resolve queries quickly.

Shifting focus from ticket closure to delivering value

Abdullah, who is not a fan of templatized conversation, encourages his team to follow brand language and empathize with the customers when responding to them. 

‘Canned Response is a great feature, but it needs to be used smartly’, affirmed Abdullah. The support team at Forest Essentials uses canned responses as a base and adds personalization on top of it when responding to customer queries. This combination allows agents to deliver value to the customers while also optimizing the response time.

Adoption made easy

The success or failure of a solution rests upon the rate and ease of adoption by users. While the user-centric features of Freshdesk did make it easy for customer support agents to adapt to the platform, the Freshworks Digital Adoption Program made it even swifter for them to be onboarded onto the platform. The program includes byte-sized training sessions that allow agents to learn at their pace, without information overload.

Improving the quality of reporting and performance

Forest Essentials switched from manual reporting to automated reports with Freshdesk Analytics. The team found these reports helpful as they could easily analyse key metrics and prepare presentations for high-level discussions. The company found the dashboards to be intuitive and provide clear visibility into agent performance, SLA achievement, and other KPIs.

With Freshdesk, agents now have a high degree of transparency in analysing their targets and performance parameters. They can track their real-time scores and chart the right actions to improve their overall performance.

"Reporting and Analytics along with the history of customers help a lot in agent evaluation and customer evaluation for issue closure." - An Agent on Abdullah’s Team

Powerful marketplace apps enhancing usability

Before Freshdesk, Forest Essentials was losing out on the advantage of receiving notifications on missed call tickets. This was a challenge for them. With Freshdesk they took advantage of the powerful marketplace of Freshworks, where they discovered Super Receptionist. With this app, agents could now track incoming calls from customers and link tickets to contact information. The system provided alerts to the team if calls were missed, enabling them to reach out to the customer. Super Receptionist was easy and seamless to integrate with Freshdesk.

Forest Essentials' three favorite things about Freshdesk

• Human connection with customers is now possible

• Ease of reporting because of the pre-configured reports and dashboards

• More clarity and transparency in the goals and performance of teams

“Answer to my problems.” says an agent when asked about the emotion that comes to mind when hearing the name ‘Freshdesk.’

What’s ahead for Forest Essentials

The company plans to start collecting CSAT surveys to understand customer sentiment and improve support practices. They have also started using Twitter integration and are exploring ways to leverage Twitter better.