Retail
India
SOLUTIONS
Average CSAT score
Increase in online orders
Conversion rate through chat
Iba Cosmetics is an India-based cosmetics company co-founded by sisters Mauli Teli and Grishma Teli. Launched in 2014, Iba is India’s first Halal-certified and vegan cosmetics brand. It offers a wide range of products that are cruelty-free, do not contain harsh chemicals, and are free of pig fat, alcohol, and other ingredients that aren’t considered halal.
Iba was first started as a retail-first brand with a number of exclusive retail stores across India. This offline approach allowed the company to develop meaningful relationships with its customers and educate them about the products offered. In 2020, however, with the whole country going into lockdown, Iba had to radically alter its strategy. We spoke to Mauli Teli- Co-founder of Iba Cosmetics, to understand how the company used Freshchat by Freshworks to adapt its offline model to the online market.
When Iba first launched in 2014, it found that Indian customers still largely preferred buying cosmetics products offline. Offline retail stores also gave the company an opportunity to educate customers about its unique value proposition. Over time, however, the cosmetics market in India evolved and Iba had to evolve along with it. “We were starting to achieve higher sales online compared to our offline stores!” says Mauli. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit India and a nationwide lockdown was enforced, the e-commerce side of Iba became central to its business.
While the benefits of having a strong online presence were obvious, the company still wanted to retain the human touch that offline customer interactions offered. “We did not want a robotic, transactional conversation with our customers. Our brand is known for having meaningful interactions with our customers and we wanted to continue this on our online interface,” says Mauli. Initially, Iba implemented a simple chat tool on the website and started a WhatsApp Business account. But as the number of online queries began to soar, it needed a smarter solution that could improve engagement efficiency without compromising the quality of interactions. This led Mauli and her team to Freshchat and the Freshworks Neo platform.
Mauli had a clear set of criteria that she wanted the new messaging solution to fulfill:
Freshchat ticked all the boxes and the company soon decided to transition from their existing support setup to the solution. A key benefit that the support team saw from this transition was that live chat and WhatsApp Business were now integrated within a single interface. And, the backing of a modern enterprise-grade platform for Freshdesk allowed them to handle all incoming queries from a single solution, without having to toggle back and forth between the two chat windows. “WhatsApp is very frequently and pervasively used by customers in India. We get a tremendous flow of queries on WhatsApp around our products, shipping times, etc. Freshchat’s ability to integrate with our WhatsApp Business account has significantly improved our efficacy on the platform.”
“Along with efficient team management, Freshchat helped us develop a stronger relationship with our customers and make the transition from an offline retail store to an online D2C brand much easier.”
By utilizing the product and platform capabilities in Freshchat Iba cosmetics has revamped its support operations. Right from answering customer questions to fulfilling orders, service agents can now support the entire customer journey through Freshchat. Mauli points to five key benefits that the solution has provided:
While the support team has undoubtedly seen improvements in the ease of their day-to-day tasks with Freshchat, the real success of the solution lies in the numbers:
Honest and personalized interactions have been at the heart of Iba’s customer service philosophy. With Freshchat, the company has been able to effortlessly recreate genuine face-to-face customer conversations in the digital medium.
“Having a human element to any conversation you have with your customers is key to building trust. We have seen higher receptivity on chat than non-human interactions such as emails or push notifications. We have also found that chat is as effective as face-to-face interactions when it comes to upselling and cross-selling our products.”
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