JOANN's Customer Service Team Reduced Backlog by 93% in One Month

The Challenge

JOANN’s vision is to be the “inspirational leader that helps everyone find their Happy Place through superior assortments, presentation, and service.” While their products and presentation may have met the objective, customer service outside of their stores was falling short.

JOANN’s legacy customer service platform, which was voice-and-email-only, was anchored around tickets and relied on a cumbersome off-platform spreadsheet for its knowledge base. This configuration made responding to and resolving issues a frustrating experience for both employees and customers.

Deeply aware of the shift toward omnichannel customer support, JOANN worked with Gladly to create a comprehensive, responsive customer service solution. Specifically, they needed software that provided multiple communication channels, supported self-service options, consolidated consumer profiles, a single, robust knowledge base, and increased productivity.

The Solution

Implementing Gladly dramatically increased the number of channels customers could use to contact JOANN’s customer support team, and it allowed agents to respond to these channels from within a single interface.

Customer service agents can now easily switch between messaging, email, or voice conversations while still having access to the entirety of a customer’s history with the company.

Improvements to JOANN’s IVR system and the use of Gladly’s self-service widget, Sidekick, ensured customers were routed to the agents most qualified to resolve their concerns.

Gladly also maximized JOANN’s reporting capabilities. For the first time, they were able to accurately quantify how customer service was affecting revenue.

The Outcome

Within one month of implementing Gladly, JOANN reduced their support backlog by 93%. And because the centralized database made it easier for agents to quickly resolve customer issues, they also saw a significant drop in call volume. The new system was so effective that JOANN’s support team successfully managed the holiday season’s 25% increase in customer support contacts without adding seasonal workers.

“Instead of 1,000 tickets, we have 700 conversations in Gladly. On our prior platform, our team was responding to about 70 to 80 emails per day on average. On Gladly, we’re averaging 120 per day per agent,” describes Drew Chamberlain, director of operations and customer experience.

Customer satisfaction is now higher, and so is employee satisfaction. Managers can quickly and easily update the system with best practices, and JOANN customer service agents have access to better knowledge bases. As a result, those agents are able to resolve issues faster and more easily.

JOANN customer care manager Ruth Jones says, “Our agents really prefer it from the old experience because they have the key customer context they need right at their fingertips. They are more motivated because they don’t have to work as hard to get work done with Gladly.”

Thready for more JOANN? Hear how they’re crafting a better experience for their customers in this episode of Radically Personal.