Feed. delivers proactive, revenue generating support with Zendesk

Eating healthy is easier said than done. Whether it’s finding the time to prepare nutritious well-balanced meals at home, the cost and availability of fresh ingredients, or the willpower to resist unhealthy sugary snacks, there is no shortage of obstacles that can sabotage someone’s diet.

That’s where Feed. comes in. The Parisian start-up that makes it easy for anyone to enjoy high-quality, nutritionally rich meals on the go. With a range of convenient meal replacement bars, shakes, and powders, its products are formulated to provide customers with 100 percent of the nutritional requirements for one meal. The company delivers vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free, non-GMO alternatives to traditional meals that start at just €2.49.

Convenient, low-cost, and high-quality, it’s no wonder that the smartfood company products have found ravenous audiences in France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The company has also discovered that it has a varied customer base from budget-minded students and on-the-go professionals to health-conscious seniors.

It’s serving this diverse group of customers that led the company to hire an experienced customer service leader who could rethink its approach to customer service.

Feeding customers with royal support

Aurore Galland, customer support happiness manager at Feed., joined the company after working in call centers and for retail customer service organizations for six years. She was drawn to the prospect of creating a new customer service organization from the ground up, one that is committed to not only putting customers at the center of the experience with great service but also introducing new proactive programs to help give customers the royal treatment.

One of the first changes Galland implemented was encouraging agents to sample Feed.’s products. She knew it was the only way agent could talk knowledgeably about them, and therefore promote them to customers; Galland herself is a big fan of the company’s sesame-and-chocolate bars. But this was just a taste of the changes to come.

Before adopting Zendesk in mid-2018, the support team was using Front, an email-based ticketing tool. “With email, it would often take us up to a week to get back to a customer request, which obviously wasn’t a great situation,” said Galland. After moving over to Zendesk, her goal now is “to treat our customers like royalty” by being available on whichever channel customers prefer.

Building a targeted, proactive, and revenue-generating support operation

Feed. currently uses Zendesk Support, Talk Partner Edition, Chat, and Explore as the foundation for its support organization. Galland chose Zendesk not only for its ability to support multiple channels but for the flexibility of its API, which enables it to plug in third-party tools and apps to create a proactive and customized support experience.

One of the ways that the foodtech company has been able to improve support and anticipate customer needs through proactive live chat. When using chat passively, the company only received 10–15 chat requests per day. By implementing proactive chat triggers, the company now hosts more than 100 live chats each day, and each of the new sessions is a sales opportunity. “By engaging with customers as they browse the store or read on the blog, we’re able to provide targeted support and solve their problems in real time,” Galland said. “For example, if someone is reading a blog about losing weight, we can point them to our lower-calorie items.”

The results are eye-popping: using conversion tracking, Galland found that team has been able to convert six percent of their live chats. This has added up to €180,000 in revenue in less than a year.

To cut down on support volume, Galland connected Shipup to Zendesk to automatically contact its customers in the event that anything unexpected occurs with an order. So rather than a customer contacting support wondering where their package is, the support team is able to send them an email alerting them to the change before the customer is inconvenienced.

“Using Shipup has dramatically lowered the volume of tickets we receive,” Galland said. “If you’re able to tell a customer about a problem in advance, they don’t have to reach out to you, and you’re able to deal with resolving their problems faster.”

It has also integrated Zendesk with Magento so agents have easy access to customers’ order information and uses Diduenjoy to collect feedback on its products and overall customer experience.

All for one and one for all

An important part of the company’s business strategy is to have its customer facing teams–sales, marketing, and customer support–in lockstep: it wants communication with customers to be on brand and for each of its products to reflect what customers want. To make sure the latter happens, the product team turns to the support team to get feedback on recipes or suggestions about how to fine-tune product offerings. It’s marketing teams also partner with the support team to understand how to write effective newsletters. This cross-functional collaboration has impacted everything from the sugar content of products and the content of its promotional giveaways to its packaging and portion sizes.

“One of the great insights we received through listening to customers in our support channels was that our ready-to-drink products were simply too big. Customers weren’t finishing them,” said Galland. That’s a direct result of feedback from customer support.”

While the start-up is still in the process of reimaging its new support organization, the early results have been encouraging for Galland and her small team of six agents. In just under a year CSAT scores have gone from 75 percent to 94 percent. The team has also improved its one-touch ticket metrics dramatically, going from 80 percent of tickets requiring multiple touchpoints to only 10 percent. And because Galland has configured Zendesk so agents are sent reports directly about their performance, agent can see for themselves where they are doing well, and where they can improve. This means less coaching for Galland.

Perhaps most impressive is how much Galland can accomplish with a small team that doesn’t have access to developer resources.

“Zendesk has helped give us a platform where I’ve been able to do almost all of the integrations by myself without any additional support. They’ve been incredibly helpful along the way,” Galland said. “When you’ve got a small team and are in a start-up, you’ve got to be ready to learn and adapt.”

Next up for Feed. is continuing to refine its omnichannel coverage with the addition of Zendesk Guide for self service and after hours support. Galland is also continuing to champion the holistic role of support within the organization, whether that’s giving the marketing team insight into what customers are saying or continuing to use customer data to refine the company’s recipes.