How social messaging helped a support team make €1 million in sales

As a young girl, Chupi Sweetman loved hearing the stories behind the rings her grandmother always wore. Her love for those heirloom pieces and the meaning they held went on to fuel her career as an award-winning jewelry designer. In 2011, she founded Chupi—a jewelry company specializing in solid gold heirloom pieces and a VIP customer experience. Along with her husband Brian Durney, now Chupi’s chief technology officer, Chupi has steadily expanded her business, which now ships to over 60 countries worldwide.

An adaptable approach drives growth and success

的关键之一Chupi的成功总是存在ahead of the curve. As early adopters of Instagram and pioneers in the sustainable jewelry industry, Chupi and Brian have never been afraid to make the most of every new opportunity. And when it came to building a customer care team, they took the same approach, spotting the potential for customer care agents to generate their own sales.

Up until 2020, Chupi’s customer support had developed organically as the shared responsibility of the shipping and returns team. This team effort was supported by an outsourced call center and a basic ticketing system. As Chupi continued to grow it was becoming clear that a dedicated customer care team and a more robust support platform would be needed, but the moment of truth arrived more quickly than expected with the onset of global lockdowns in 2020.

With new employees onboarding remotely, it was crucial that any new customer support platform was relatively quick and easy to learn. “The key thing we needed was a user-friendly platform, especially as we were starting with a remote team. Zendesk was very easy to set up and we were able to migrate our existing tickets into it easily,” Brian explained.

Leveraging data driven insights to develop business strategy

除了第一天,it was important that a new customer support platform could scale and adapt to meet new business needs. Having the power to turn Zendesk features on, as and when they were needed was a huge plus. “I’d say that Zendesk is a bit like getting a Swiss army knife. You’re immediately testing different things out. As our team got to know the platform they could quickly pivot to meet new trends, for example by turning on live chat to manage simple one-touch queries. Now we have 98.6% CSAT on live chat.”

Chupi’s newest team continued to expand to meet increasing customer demand. What started as a small team of 3 has now grown to 6 dedicated customer care staff, and a new head of customer experience. Brian credits Zendesk with informing that strategic growth.

“I put Zendesk right bang in the center of it all. One of the key things we needed was to be able to look at numbers, scale, past trends, and forecasts. We migrated all of our tickets from the old platform into Explore, so we had the historical data. Explore analyzed that data and gave us a better understanding of how we got to where we are and where we are going. So it really helped inform a lot of the hiring strategy.”

€1 million in care-based sales after a pandemic pivot

With a dedicated customer care team up and running and more insight into the customer journey, Brian spotted the potential to turn customer support inquiries into sales revenue.

“When we had an outsourced call service, there were customers ringing up saying, ‘Can I get that in size X? How much is this? Is there a discount on this wedding ring?’ But they were going straight to a call center that had no idea about our product. So, my big sell for the customer care team was these guys will sell. They’ll sell quietly and they’ll sell with kindness.”

Having a team of agents empowered and encouraged to sell, gave Chupi a headstart on finding digital solutions when global lockdowns forced their flagship store to temporarily close. While Chupi is predominantly an online business, their brick-and-mortar store in Dublin is a huge asset—this is where customers view and try on pieces before buying. “Our store has visitors from the US, the UK, Europe, and of course Ireland. If they’re spending 10,000 to 20,000 on an engagement ring, people like to come in and actually look at the pieces,” Brian explained.

To replace this one-to-one customer experience, Chupi launched a virtual jewelry consultation service. “When our customer care agents feel they’ve nearly got a sale over the line, but that customer needs to see the jewelry, they escalate the ticket in Zendesk, book a virtual consultation, and follow up with a post-consultation package. Those sessions have a successful conversion rate of 65%.”

通过Zendes亚博k, Chupi的客户服务团队ble to seamlessly track, nurture, and follow up with their potential sales leads at every stage of the customer journey. “In 2020 we had a 300% increase in care-based sales, resulting in one million euros in sales directly from the customer care team,” Brian reported.

Customer profiles, social messages, and purchase history all one one screen

From the beginning, the priority was to bring all customer information into one platform, as Brian explained. “First and foremost, I decided to look at a platform that could pull all of our customer data into one place. We needed all of our calls, tickets, and DMs from Instagram and Facebook going into the one platform.”

Being able to see the full story behind each customer inquiry empowered Chupi’s customer care agents to provide a more consistent, personalized service. “They’re seeing that same customer ring, on chat, on email, and in DMs. So, they can keep them all in the same ecosphere the entire time,” Brian explained.

Zendesk’s integration with Shopify is a crucial element of this single platform system. “It’s about not having to have three or four different systems that you need to jump in and out of. The Shopify integration was one of the reasons we chose Zendesk. It’s incredibly useful to see a customer’s full details and purchase history,” Brian explained.

Big rewards for investing in customer relationships

Chupi’s customer care agents are leveraging Zendesk’s robust tagging system to make the most of this wealth of information. “We can tag and group particular customers. So we’ve started building up a book of clients that we know. Then when, for example, we launch a new range, we have customers that we know will be interested. We can reach out to them in advance and say ‘Just to let you know, we’re launching our new collection. We can put you on the list straight away’”.

This relationship-focused approach has paid off in ways beyond the bottom line. When a customer scores Chupi highly on customer satisfaction, the team reaches out to them and asks if they’d be willing to leave a public review. Chupi’s presence in reviews is impressive, bolstered by genuine anecdotes and reviews from over 250 customers with whom they have established meaningful relationships.

The numbers tell the story

69% of all Chupi’s customer inquiries are one touch tickets, which the team aims to resolve fully within 24 hours. And as usual, they’re way ahead of the curve. “Our full resolution is usually 20 hours. So we’re beating our own KPI by 25%,” Brian explained. With a 98% CSAT, Chupi can be sure they’re providing the highest level of customer care.