When a leading young adult apparel retailer set their sights on revamping their digital customer service experience to stand out from their competitors, they turned to Linc.
PacSun Doubles Down on Modernizing Their Customer Experience
Pacific Sunwear of California, LLC, more commonly known as PacSun, is an American retail clothing brand that offers lifestyle apparel, along with footwear and accessories, designed for teens and young adults.
Having already established themselves as a forward-thinking fashion brand, PacSun’s new goal was to meet their customers’ growing expectations and further position themselves as a customer-centric business obsessed with providing an unparalleled customer experience.
Shirley Gao
Chief Information Officer | PacSun
PacSun
"Seeing the power of automation and the benefits of real-time insights, PacSun’s team has formed a close partnership with the Linc Customer Success team to develop quarterly plans on undertaking the next use case sets that can continue to move the needle on customer satisfaction and revenue."
Challenge
The first major challenge for PacSun was alleviating the burden on their inundated contact centers.
With the major uptick in online shopping over the last 18 months, PacSun’s call centers were experiencing a flood of outreach from consumers with inquiries ranging from basic product questions to business-critical make-good issues and post-purchase order support.
With this influx of call volume seemingly happening overnight, PacSun’s support agents were soon overwhelmed by the increasing volume, which resulted in long wait times for issue resolution and, subsequently, low customer satisfaction.
Shirley Gao
Chief Information Officer | PacSun
PacSun
"Seeing the power of automation and the benefits of real-time insights, PacSun’s team has formed a close partnership with the Linc Customer Success team to develop quarterly plans on undertaking the next use case sets that can continue to move the needle on customer satisfaction and revenue."
Approach
PacSun began a phased approach to deploying their CX automation solutions—focusing first on what their customers wanted most.
This required a deep collaboration between PacSun and Linc’s customer success team. Together, they were able to identify the most noticeable bottlenecks and barriers within PacSun’s existing CX strategy that led to decreased customer satisfaction.
By applying a unique combination of automation and self-service solutions, PacSun was able to leapfrog their past customer service offerings and see a tremendous improvement in their CSAT scores.
By modernizing their CX strategy with automation and empowering their customers to resolve their own inquiries themselves, PacSun managed to future-proof their customer service strategy to weather both the continued rise in eCommerce and the upcoming holiday season–a particularly critical time that would bring a further increased volume of customer inquiries.
Additionally, PacSun leveraged Linc’s digital workers within their CX strategy to automate the resolution of post-purchase order support inquiries, which include answering order status questions, facilitating seamless returns and exchanges through self-service landing pages, and addressing issues pertaining to fulfillment speed and delivery issue policies.
PacSun
Results
83% of all customer inquiries were resolved by AI-powered Digital Workers within the first 30 days of launch, leaving only 17%of inquiries requiring human support.
Additionally, WISMO inquiries–a key driver of call center inquiries before automation–fell out of the top 15 inquiry topics routed to the call center. After a particularly difficult year where staffing contact center roles was especially challenging, this delivered a huge improvement in call center performance and scalability.
The holistic approach of combining AI-powered digital workers, proactive notifications, and self-service landing pages greatly improved customer satisfaction.
With Linc’s digital workers acting as first responders, customer service chat became an on-demand, 24/7 feature whereas, previously, 51% of PacSun’s customer chat interactions happened outside of the operational hours of their live agents.
Furthermore, the proactive notifications delivered by the digital workers kept customers informed about their order status, estimated delivery time, new ETAs in instances of delays, as well as their return statuses.
The leveraging of Linc’s digital workers contributed to noticeable improvements in agent performance, job satisfaction and overall happiness.
Across the board, the implementation of digital workers made agents’ jobs more manageable, even in cases of an inquiry escalation.
Linc’s digital workers were able to help authenticate a customer and collect all of the necessary information before looping in the customer service agents.
Though a seamless integration between Linc’s AI-powered digital workers and PacSun’s existing Gladly customer service solution, context about the customers, orders or products and their past chat history was made accessible to PacSun customer service agents at hand-off, resulting in substantial improvements to first-contact resolution rates and time-to-resolution.
Additionally, because the more tedious support cases, such as order issues, were largely resolved entirely by Linc’s digital workers, agents were able to focus solely on business-critical use cases that only they could resolve, delivering better agent happiness and retention.
26% of PacSun’s shoppers have now voluntarily opted-in to the notification service, eliminating customer questions before they even arise.
Over 95% of PacSun’s shoppers have leveraged the self-service landing page for order status and returns, further reducing their need to contact customer service.
Through this holistic approach, PacSun incorporated automation into all major customer service touch points and created a seamless experience that delighted their shoppers.
The shift to self-service and automation solutions opened up new possibilities for customer engagement and revenue generation.
When PacSun approached Linc to improve their customer service experience, they already had a deep understanding of the holistic nature of the “service” and “engagements” Linc’s solutions provided.
Part of the strategic goal for automation was to identify contextual opportunities to further engage with their customers.
These engagements ranged from inspiring customers to make additional purchases by displaying products that were compatible with what they had ordered during a delivery notification experience, to assisting customers with finding alternative products during a return or exchange experience, or enabling sizing and other product-related questions to be easily answered by Linc’s concierge-like consultative selling digital worker.
With Linc’s AI-powered digital workers able to understand customer context and intent, PacSun was able to address their customers’ precise needs and make product recommendations that were personalized to the customer and relevant to the moment. Since this implementation, service moment-led purchase inspirations are achieving a 19% sales conversion rate within a seven-day window.
Finally PacSun was able to leverage real-time insights on what their customers were inquiring about, without any manual labeling.
Inherently, Linc’s AI automatically understands over 300 essential commerce service topics.
Out of the box, it was able to leverage PacSun’s catalogue and policies to understand specific product, order and service terminologies.
Via Linc’s client portal, the PacSun team was able to access real-time analytics on user intents, sentiment, resolution effectiveness and more. The portal also allowed the team to analyze trends over different time periods, as well as zoom in or out on service inquiry topics.
This level of advanced analytics enabled PacSun to make data-led decisions on where to focus on their service experience and policy optimization, and provided valuable feedback to operational and product teams on issues that were previously difficult to prescribe.
Future Plans
Through a seamless integration between Linc’s AI-powered digital workers and PacSun’s existing Gladly customer service solution, context about the customers, orders or products and their past chat history was made accessible to PacSun customer service agents at hand-off, resulting in substantial improvements to first-contact resolution rates and time-to-resolution.
With Linc’s AI, PacSun was able to make product recommendations that were personalized to the customer and relevant to the moment.
Since this implementation, service moment-led purchase inspirations are achieving a 19% sales conversion rate within a seven-day window.
PacSun, together with Linc, is poised to set a new standard in customer experience across eCommerce and digital retail, outpacing their competition in providing unparalleled customer satisfaction.
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