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

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

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

 

Likewise Rashmi ! Looking forward a fun-filled night

alyssia.correa
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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?

Ally, Freshworks Community Manager
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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!

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. 

 

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

S
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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?

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. 

And how do you sync both offline and online experiences?

alyssia.correa
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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?

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. 

You’re right - consistency really is key! And a lot of attention to detail - this will ensure best in class service!

Ally, Freshworks Community Manager
alyssia.correa
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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?

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

Really good points @Isaac Thomas - I think its important to focus on employee experience as much as customer experience! A happy employee = a happy customer!

Ally, Freshworks Community Manager
Isaac Thomas
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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?

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. 

And how do you sync both offline and online experiences?

Eagerly waiting for @kannan.rajaratnam’s response! 😐

-- Isaac
rhea.desouza
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This next one I’m sure will be helpful for many! 

Q4: How has having a streamlined system assisted help desk agents be better at their jobs and not burn out, especially since expectations on customer support has RISEN through the pandemic?

Besides the team we also used the opportunity to onboard stakeholders to use Freshworks to attend to escalations. The SLA with stakeholders helped to create the right expectation and a standard approach for the employees to remember. The data that we derive on tracing these interactions have been a great deal of help in structuring new process or optimising the current one. 

Love that idea! 

Cheers | Team Freshworks Community
Isaac Thomas
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My bad, should have tagged them earlier 😓

@keefe.andrews @zachary.king @Alefre @ErikAlmSynerity @manns @vijay_2am 

 

-- Isaac
rhea.desouza
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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!

Cheers | Team Freshworks Community
alyssia.correa
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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?

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. 

 

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

Ally, Freshworks Community Manager
kannan.rajaratnam
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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.

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! 

rhea.desouza
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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?

Cheers | Team Freshworks Community

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