Exclusive Q&A with DTC brand Chubbies customer experience manager
A direct-to-consumer specialty menswear brand is using cloud-based scalability to ensure proper customer help desk staffing levels.
Austin, Texas-based Chubbies Shorts specializes in manufacturing and selling specialty retro men’s “short shorts” with a four-inch inseam, mainly via its e-commerce site. The company also sells products through wholesale and brick-and-mortar retail partners, as well as in partnership with Amazon.
Rachel Black, customer experience manager, Chubbies Shorts, recently spoke with Chain Store Age about how the company leverages the Simplr Human Cloud Network customer experience outsourcing platform, which enables it to seamlessly scale customer service agent staff levels as needed.
Chubbies accepts inbound customer service requests via channels including email, chat, SMS text, and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Chubbies also conducts outbound customer service phone calls upon request.
What issues was Chubbies facing with customer service staffing?
Chubbies has quite a few waves of inbound customer service requests. Our high seasons are summer and Christmas, where we have to ramp up hiring. Typically, we would go from five to 12 agents during the months of May, June, July and August, and then we would have to let several people go.
But we would wind up having to hire more customer service agents starting in October for Christmas season, and then not need extra staff again till April or so. So Chubbies was hiring people every few months, which was a real pain. Sometimes we would find really good people but just didn't need that many hands for the lower-volume months, or didn't have the budget for them.
How has Simplr Human Cloud Network helped Chubbies resolve these issues?
The Simplr solution has helped Chubbies scale our customer service staff levels on a pay-per-ticket basis. It also helps us quickly scale when we have unprecedented and unexpected upticks in customer service requests and can’t hire people right away.
These upticks are caused by events such as Chubbies having a big sale. In 2022, we had a parcel carrier lose a pallet of 500 packages and were getting inbound service requests from all of the affected customers.
This capability to scale customer service staff according to volume has been the most helpful aspect of the Simplr solution, just in helping Chubbies not have to hire people, right away.
Overall, less agent hiring results in lot less work for me and a lot less need to conduct training, as well. I have also been able to hire some new permanent customer service agents.
Can you share any specific success metrics?
First response or first reply time with chat and SMS text requests is usually in under 30 seconds, which is fantastic. For email requests, first response time is usually under 15 minutes, which is also great. These are mostly quicker than the response times from my full-time agents.
Have you seen any increase in sales resulting from improved customer service?
Sales is not something I have specifically measured in terms of how our help desk might affect results. I don't know specifically whether there has been a lot of sales resulting from customer service interactions or not.
But I want our agents to strictly look at providing customer service. I don't want the experience to be too ‘salesy,’ or have our agents push for sales. Chubbies has had positive customer reviews saying they love how our agents did not try to sell them something, so I want to keep that momentum. Sometimes customer service agents do recommend things.
How does Chubbies ensure Human Cloud Network agents provide satisfactory performance?
We go through the Human Cloud Network contacts that have gotten lower customer satisfaction or customer effort scores, and see if there is something that they could have said differently or something that a full-time Chubbies employee would have done differently. Then we submit feedback on those tickets within the Simplr portal.
When we first deployed the solution, we had to do this a lot. But since it is a learning tool, we now only have to submit an incident ticket once every two weeks or so.
Does Chubbies use any AI-based customer service solutions?
No, we just use additional human support. I'm still kind of on the fence about AI. We haven't gone to the Simplr AI cloud network just yet. That’s something we might do in the future.