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 

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. 

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

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

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. 

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

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?

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?

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. 

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

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

Wow! Going all the way back to Friendster