How Zalora powers a 5% QOQ leap in CSAT scores with Freshdesk

About Zalora

A leading lifestyle e-tailer in Southeast Asia, headquartered in Singapore, Zalora is a part of the Global Fashion Group. The one-stop, curated shopping platform provides a range of apparel, beauty and lifestyle, essentials, home, and living products. With operations across SEA in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Zalora has been in the business for over a decade and is the market leader in the segment. 

We spoke to Kannan Rajaratnam, the Regional Director, Customer Operations at Zalora, to understand how their partnership with Freshworks helped them overcome their business challenges and build a cost-effective support platform. He gave us insights into how Freshdesk enabled Zalora to increase agent response time and enhance personalization for their 50M+ monthly customers.
 

Lack of collaboration, integrations, and unified view of data - Zalora’s business challenges 

For Zalora, the need for a customer support platform became more evident over the years as siloed operations and system limitations severely impacted agent productivity. One agent was working on a dozen tickets at once, unable to give quick, valuable responses to any of the customers because data was siloed, spread across excel sheets and other apps, making the entire process time-consuming and ineffective. Zalora wanted to enable collaboration, get teams to work together and deliver seamless experiences for their employees and customers.

Data was highly fragmented, with multiple systems and apps involved and customers engaging across different channels. As Zalora’s customer base grew, it became increasingly difficult for support agents to provide quick responses because they did not have a unified view of customer data.

“While we were evaluating platforms to help us overcome these challenges, one of the key factors was how different the UI would be compared to what we had and how user-friendly the platform was. The main reason we picked Freshdesk was that it has an easy-to-adopt UI which could help us increase speed and agility” says Kannan. 

How Zalora surpassed challenges and built a robust omnichannel support

With a Freshdesk implementation tailored to their needs, Zalora improved data granularity and boosted support team efficiency by increasing their speed and agility. 

The low total cost of ownership (TCO) came in handy as it helped Zalora build its business case and get faster approvals and buy-ins from other teams. The low TCO also enabled a quick shift to a software vendor who was better suited to address their immediate business requirements. 

Freshdesk facilitated making Zalora available to its customers 24/7, providing instant support and an elevated digital shopping experience by streamlining all support activities and unifying data across channels like the website and social media. The support team was equipped to have more personalized, value-driven conversations with customers on channels of their choice. Zalora provided a quick, fulfilling, and delightful experience with Freshdesk, increasing customer loyalty and retention. 

“As a business that puts our customers first, we wanted to create a solution that helped us serve them better, giving rise to the need for a lot of personalization. The team at Freshworks was ever-ready and supportive, helped us build tailored solutions for every request we had, bringing our vision to life.”  

Freshdesk was an ideal fit that catered to all their support needs to an extent where other teams started evaluating Freshworks’ products, and their finance team implemented Freshdesk. “The adoption by our finance shared service team was a pleasant surprise to me. This implementation helped us further by seamlessly integrating with their platform, allowing us to raise tickets related to customer payments and refunds directly. This integration significantly reduced the number of hours support teams spent on these activities and increased their productivity.”
 

Business-as-usual, onboarding an all-new support platform, and ensuring a seamless employee and customer experience – all during the peak of the pandemic

Freshdesk’s user-friendly UI enabled teams to make the shift and quickly adapt to the new system despite working from home. The product stability and suite of features helped Zalora automate some tasks. Access to a host of new opportunities and features helped Zalora easily handle the additional volume of customers that came in along with the lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions.

“Freshdesk helped us sail through during the last one and a half years. After the pandemic outbreak, customers no longer stuck to a single channel. As they kept switching, our omnichannel helpdesk enabled consistent, effortless service to customers across channels.”

Here’s what Freshdesk made possible:

• Easy-to-use, omnichannel helpdesk that powered effortless service to 50+ million monthly visitors
• Significant enhancements in agent productivity like average handling time, tickets handled per agent, and resolution rates - Today, one agent can manage up to six customers simultaneously
• 75% of customers became repeat shoppers
• 5% QOQ increase in CSAT score
• Impressive cost savings, some of which channeled into improving employee experience

Zalora - Freshworks partnership - The journey ahead 

Zalora began with Freshdesk and went on to add Freshchat as well to serve customers better. They consolidated and integrated various domains into a single inbox and onboarded new engagement channels to interact seamlessly with customers. Today, Zalora is working with Freshworks to utilize Freshdesk capabilities better, build a more robust support team, and provide customers with a superior omnichannel shopping experience. They are working on an enhanced strategy that leverages Freshwork’s AI capabilities to gather more insights from data to create more tailored experiences across the website, mobile, and more.