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

Wow, this has been an exciting half-hour! Cheers everyone for taking the time to get involved. We hope to do many more such events that can help you make the most of your product. 

Last but not least, a huge thank you to Kannan - your insights are much appreciated, and I’m sure our members would have learnt a few things along the way.

A happy dance to celebrate this session!

Until next time!

Thank you Rhea for coordinating. The questions were very resourceful and gave me a lot of reflections on our journey as well. Happy to contribute today, hope it has been helpful. Feel free to drop a note here on linkedin should anyone need further clarification! 

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!

Good points Isaac, having the basic infrastructure is essential. We always have been very cautious in making sure the team is equipped with the best tools. During peak we tend to shift focus on the human side of things to keep them motivated. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

We don’t have offline experience currently while we introduced them in the past as part of our awareness campaigns. Some of the key considerations was creating strong backend visibility of data and information that is powering our front end tracking systems or the reference tool for our front liners. We had hybrid models where you could order online and collect at our store or browse physical product offline and head on to one of the customers there to place an order assisted by an employee of ZALORA. @Isaac Thomas 

Precisely, Customer service is not a walk in the park. I have always regarded the role as one of the most challenging yet having a holistic view of the organisation’s processes. Some musings here.

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?

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.

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