Data-driven CX at Thrasio supports revenue growth and innovation

Thrasio is a next-generation consumer goods company reimagining how the most-loved products become accessible to everyone. Thrasio has acquired over 200 brands from Amazon sellers and uses their expertise to grow those brands’ footprints on and beyond Amazon, expand product lines, and reach customers around the globe.

A leader in the ecommerce startup space, Thrasio sells thousands of different products in many verticals across Amazon’s global marketplaces and has a tremendous global reach with direct-to-consumer sites, as well as brick and mortar retail placements. A Top-5 Amazon seller, the majority of the company’s business comes from Amazon.

A commitment to excellence and customer satisfaction informs every part of the team’s support strategy, explains Gershwin Exeter, vice president of global services at Thrasio.

“We provide a unique balance between humanity and technology,” says Exeter. “We use that technology to write Zendesk macros that are designed by humans for humans, so they are customer centric and simple.”

Hitting reset on CX to optimize people, processes, and tech

Exeter was part of new customer experience leadership that helped Thrasio relaunch Zendesk to optimize the business. “We were on a trajectory for major growth, and high-functioning customer experience was crucial to our growth,” says Exeter. “Using Zendesk helped us hit a hard reset so we could put the right people, policies, and technology initiatives in place.”

In addition to rolling out Zendesk Suite with Agent Workspace, Thrasio conducted extensive agent training to promote greater efficiencies. Zendesk Professional Services was also pivotal in getting Thrasio up and running on the platform, while setting up integrations and advanced workflows. “Zendesk is an exceptional partner. We launched on time and within scope using fresh, out-of-the-box features,” says Exeter.

Today, email serves as the primary support channel, making up 90 percent of Thrasio’s total volume. Agents can also create support tickets through voice and social channels. Adding Zendesk messaging and knowledge base radically shifted CX at Thrasio, providing better ticketing, self-service, and automation capabilities.

Best-in-class integrations reduce tech stack by 85%

After a smooth rollout, Exeter moved on to the second phase of its CX initiative: transforming the business. Setting up best-in-class integrations with Zendesk helped Thrasio cut back from 66 technology vendors to just 10 efficient partners, creating an 85 percent reduction in platforms.

A key tool is ChannelReply, which connects Zendesk and Seller Central to ensure buyer and seller messages are managed through Zendesk, directly from Amazon. As a result, Thrasio saw an impressive 97 percent improvement in average first response time (from 26 hours to 42 minutes).

The Zendesk-ChannelReply integration also drove an incredible 99 percent decrease in full resolution time, from 221 hours (9+ days) to just 54 minutes.

Thrasio is transforming workforce management using Assembled and leveraging Litmos and Disprz as a blended employee development and content portal. The team’s gamified employee dashboard, AmplifAI, gives employees a visual display of their performance and provides managers roll-up views and data used to create employee points, badges, and rewards.

Cutting edge CX driven by a ‘data gold mine’

According to Exeter, the third phase of innovation is where Thrasio truly shines. Relaunching Zendesk empowered Thrasio to start mining customer tickets for rich data used to optimize the platform.

“Most businesses are sitting on a data gold mine within their customer profiles,” explains Exeter. “We use Amazon, Zendesk, and integrations to get data on customer interactions that no one else is collecting.”

While most companies rely on CX tech partners to implement those tools and capabilities, Thrasio is taking a cutting-edge approach to leverage its own unique information. The team uses its conversational Zendesk CRM to compile data and create sophisticated customer profiles, which can be used to drive business and brand loyalty. It’s a blend of human touch and digital innovation.

Using a combination of Qualtrics and Tether, Thrasio is successfully tracking 100 percent of customer interactions (via human and auto response) to determine intent, compliance, and trends. “We track the whole conversation using speech-to-text conversion and sentiment analysis to see exactly what customers are asking about.”

CX innovation creates more revenue-generating opportunities

Before relaunching Zendesk in 2022, the CX team was focused on inbound ‘customer service’ and providing reactive support. With its new tech stack and wealth of data, Thrasio can proactively create opportunities that drive B2C revenue, B2B revenue, and reconciliation recovery.

If a B2C customer makes a purchase or initiates a return, employees can introduce them to Thrasio’s 200-brand portfolio. “When a customer comes in with one problem, we can solve the issue and create new revenue with a unique capacity to upsell or cross-sell because of the depth and breadth within our product line,” says Exeter.

On the B2B side, proactive outreach also helps create customers for life, thus generating continual revenue. “Using data integration with Zendesk, we can see all incoming tickets for wholesale orders and create automatic triggers that remind customers to restock,” notes Exeter.

In the past, Thrasio did not receive compensation for orders that were fulfilled by Amazon but showed up broken or delayed, but the new seamless integrations and data insights give the team an effective way to recoup those losses from Amazon.

Predictive insights to rule the future of CX at Thrasio

Thrasio reported over $1 billion in revenue in 2021 and continued growing globally last year across Europe, China, Japan, and most recently, India. The company has raised a total of $3.4 billion in financing and remains focused on future expansion.

Meanwhile, Exeter is cultivating an appetite for information across the organization. In a recent meeting with leadership, he highlighted Thrasio’s dramatic improvements in agent efficiency to show how customer service is a brand differentiator in the Amazon space.

Exeter has already outlined additional CX goals for each team to complete. Product development and brand management will take action on customer feedback, compliance will get in front of potential risks, distribution will see what’s driving returns, and marketing will leverage customer information to increase brand engagement.

“We’ll take data from Zendesk, Salesforce, Qualtrics, Tether, Amazon, and social channels, and combine it to create a predictive insights platform,” Exeter says, noting that Brandwatch tracks customer activity on social media. With a revamped tech stack and CX strategy in motion, Thrasio is well positioned to continue driving brand loyalty and growth by combining human and digital innovation.