Decathlon with
Freshworks
Since Decathlon Taiwan introduced Freshdesk Messaging about a year ago, the initial response time for a customer's work order (query) has been significantly reduced from 2.5 hours to less than 5 minutes.
Abby Lin
Success Customer Manager of Decathlon Taiwan
Decathlon and Freshworks business opportunity
Decathlon Group is one of the largest sports retailers in the world, with more than 1,600 stores in 69 different countries and regions. With the business philosophy of gathering all sports together under one roof, it sells high-quality products at low prices via self-service. After entering the Taiwan market in the 1990s, it has grown into the largest sports retailer in Taiwan, with more than 10 branches in major cities. Due to the rapid growth of Taiwan Decathlon’s e-commerce business, answering customers’ emails has gradually brought challenges to the customer service team for specialists need to spend more time replying to emails instead of responding to customers’ immediate needs.
To resolve this issue, Decathlon has been searching for a communication tool that is more efficient, easy to use, and provides a good customer experience. After comparing different service providers, they chose Freshdesk Messaging (formerly Freshchat) and Master Concept, Freshworks’ preferred partner in Taiwan to assist with professional advice and technology introduction.
The customer service crisis before Freshworks
About a year ago, as the e-commerce business boosted, responding to customer emails was one of the biggest challenges for Decathlon’s customer service team. They are spending more time responding to messages than ever before, rather than responding to customers’ needs instantly in an effective way. As a result, the situation of “longer reply time, short session of customers on the website and slower business growth” appears. One of the most important things for the success of an enterprise is to review customer engagement and satisfaction. Especially to online businesses, they would like customers to perceive that they are been valued even if there is no face-to-face sales process. Yet, Decathlon’s customer service team is not only unable to respond to customer requests immediately, but the initial response to customer inquiries also takes 2.5 hours.
The implementation of Freshdesk Messaging allows faster customer communication
To fix the above issue and improve customer service performance, Master Concept assisted Decathlon in introducing Freshdesk messaging, Freshworks’ leading cloud-based customer support software. Freshdesk Messaging offers rich APIs for customized integration, automated workflow, and intelligent analysis for enterprises. With the professional consultation of Master Concept, Decathlon is able to establish and launch instant chat and FAQ functions within a week. Before that, when a customer had a problem with an online purchase, they had to log out of the site to write an email to the customer service and return back to the site to continue their shopping. After using Freshdesk Messaging, customers can just click the icon in the lower right corner of the website to immediately contact the customer service team or query related FAQ without leaving the website.
When contacting a customer, the system can track which page the customer is viewing, whether there is a shopping cart or shopping list, etc. Based on these data, Decathlon’s customer service team can not only respond to questions rapidly but also better understand customer inquiries, so as to make more accurate replies. “Freshworks offers powerful features that enable our customer service staff to quickly and accurately react to customers’ issues, dramatically reduce response times, automatically assign work orders to make teams work more evenly, and make it easier for on-duty managers to manage productivity.” commented by Abby Lin, the customer service manager at Decathlon Taiwan.
Decathlon utilizes Freshdesk Messaging to reduce 96% of customer service response duration.
Since conducting Freshdesk Messaging for a year, the number of work orders (queries) from customers (including conversations from Freshdesk Messaging) increased from an average of 3,500 to 5,500 per month. On the other hand, the initial response time of the work order was sharply reduced from 2.5 hours to less than 5 minutes. More customer inquiries have also contributed to the high online sales performance of Decathlon. Abby also said that the previous email inquiry is not convenient, for customers consider it too complicated and would rather choose not to purchase at all. After using Freshdesk Messaging, customers can ask whenever they want easily when they have any concerns during the purchase.
Furthermore, customer responses have been very positive overall, regardless of whether their problem has been resolved, and customer satisfaction remains at a high level of 85-90%. About half of its customers currently use the instant chat feature to contact the customer service team, which is up from the company’s previous estimate of 20-30%. In addition, only 40-45% of Decathlon Taiwan customers who have inquired about Decathlon Taiwan via email end up shopping in the company. However, after the introduction of Freshdesk Messaging, this proportion has increased to 50-55%, greatly boosting the purchase rate of Decathlon Taiwan.
Freshworks offers powerful features that enable our customer service staff to quickly and accurately react to customers’ issues, dramatically reduce response times, automatically assign work orders to make teams work more evenly, and make it easier for on-duty managers to manage productivity.