Community Spotlight: AMA with Freshdesk MVP, Kannan, Director of payments, Zalora

Hello hello hello! It’s an exciting start to week 4 of March Madness, here in the community, no points for guessing why!

T-minus 60 minutes to go! @kannan.rajaratnam from leading retailer and Freshdesk customer, Zalora joins us to chat about all things retail and Freshdesk.

Keep your questions ready, and your experiences handy, it’s almost time to engage, and collaborate to get the most out of Freshdesk.

Here are a few things to know before we get started -

1. Drop in your questions in the comments section right here!

2. Feel free to answer questions coming in from your peers. It definitely helps to get everyone’s perspective!.

3. Be mindful of your comments to others and remember to abide by the community guidelines.

Tagging a few folks to jump in and share their thoughts if time permits!

@vin @finn @Samuel @Jerome.Haynes @JulianeB @foxcubmama @shimi @TheresaDorr @zachary.king @Arvind Ramamurti @ThatCommunityGuy  @Isaac Thomas @alyssia.correa @meeta.sharma @akshara.sruthi @annapoorna.v @rashmi.nag 

Really looking forward to this! Welcome to the Refresh Community @kannan.rajaratnam - excited to have you with us!

As you’ve quoted above, customers are constantly online today and want quick responses and aren’t always so forgiving to long turn-arounds- How has the need for instant gratification changed the retail industry? How do we cater to these increasing expectations?

…AND, WE ARE READY FOR TAKE-OFF!

In our first customer spotlight session, we are joined by Zalora’s director of payments, Kannan Rajatraman! 

An experienced Freshdesk omnichannel user, Kannan will be tackling all your questions around  

✈️ Driving customer delight using Freshdesk

😀 Agent Efficiency and well-being

💬 Consistent customer experience at scale for online retailers

A warm welcome, @kannan.rajaratnam!

Generally we are seeing an ever evolving trend when it comes to speed, when we first started 10 years ago, delivering within 3 days was a wow element and today we delivery 97-99% of orders in the next day. On CS replying within 24 hours was acceptable now majority of our replies are instantaneous with chat and even for some of the most complex queries we resolve them on avg or 13-15 hours. 

Before we jump into the Q&A, I’d like to ask @kannan.rajaratnam a few questions to hit the ground running! So here it is - 

Q1: How has Freshdesk omnichannel helped you deliver delight? Could you share a few examples?

Click ‘quote’ and share your answer.

This question is open to the forum, so please feel free to add your thoughts too!

Welcome to the Refresh Community, @kannan.rajaratnam 😀 Excited to have you host our very first Community take-over.

Thanks for doing this @kannan.rajaratnam :) 

How early in the pandemic did you decide to venture into WFH accessories? It's one thing to recognise the opportunity, and another to execute that with the precision that Zalora did! Would love for you to shed some light around this.

Wow that is an impressive turnaround time! How times have changed - I wonder what future customers will expect in terms of response time! 

That’s amazing. Are you using chatbots or a mix of customer support agents and automated messages? 

Great questions to kick off the evening or rather night for me :) We love the idea of having seamless and interconnected view of our customers and Freshdesk delivers that. Regardless of channel where the customer is contacting us and move over to a different channel we are able to undertake and provide satisfactory resolution without having to have the customer to repeat their situation to us. The shift from traditional voice, emails to chat and social media is prominent yet customers do expect to retain certain replies in a more formal manner as reference and Freshdesk enables us to do just that. 

Yes, we use a combination of both chatbot and human interaction where in some areas are assisted by some level of automation. 

I think it is so important to ensure that customers do not have to repeat their problem statement/ issues twice! 

Thank you for the question Arvind, as cases were rising in SEA and it was one day I walked into the office and told my team in MY, PH and ID to prepare to work from home as early as the next day. 6 hours of preparation, sourcing the hardware etc and the governments across SEA started announcing lockdowns and the next day all 300 employees were working from home. Funfact : A week later we trained and onboarded everyone into Freshworks! 

Welcome @kannan.rajaratnam. My question for you - How do you keep employees motivated through busy seasons where increased volumes are bound to take a toll?

Likewise Rashmi ! Looking forward a fun-filled night

Next question!

Q2: While it is key for a company to be available across mediums, which channel of support seems to work best for an online retailer like yours?

Precisely my thought as well. With the ever growing demands as a customer, Tech I’m sure is keeping pace. 

Excited to see how this game evolves!

This used to a big challenge as our business is quite seasonal with peaks hitting 10X the volume. Typically a-lot of advance planning takes place with expectation setting and some level of restriction and process review to improve turn around time. We also focus on mass and proactive updates to keep the impact to contact centre minimal. Beyond that, we shift the cost savings realized from other expenses to incentivise performing talents. 

My other questions is - how does Zalora provide a unified/holistic experience to their customers? How do you tackle this when sometimes offline and online retail experiences are so different?

Having a seamless and interconnected view of our customers and their requests is certainly so important in this time! 

First it was Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Instagram and now Tiktok. Likewise, we have customers hopping between emerging trends and having chic and classy brand appearance demands us to be available on all platforms with social media gaining prominence in recent times. 

Just a thought!

Organizations should first have their infrastructure in place. If not, employees would get frustrated very soon.

Basic infra like:

1. Good laptops, PCs, etc.
2. Give enough reimbursements for a high bandwidth internet connection (considering WFH scenario)
3. Required tools / software to reduce manual intervention

Consistency is key, we have a set of standard measure across different touch points, example delivery lead time, payment invalidation, aging ticket, CSAT. Ensuring customers have great and consistency experiences helps to keep us ahead of the curve when it comes to best in class service. 

Wow! Going all the way back to Friendster 😀