KURU's Customer Service Team Cut Inbound Volume by 40%

The Challenge

Independently-owned, web-driven shoe company KURU is committed to continuous innovation that delivers endless comfort and relief from foot pain.

As a small business, KURU’s customer service, e-commerce, and marketing teams work together to anticipate and meet their customers’ needs. But they were noticing a worrying trend—their customer service ticket volume was increasing at the same rate as their sales volume. It was threatening to overwhelm their team.

With communication channels housed on separate platforms, heroes couldn’t tell if customers were reaching out on multiple channels. This meant different heroes were often wasting time trying to resolve the same problem.

The lack of a unified customer view and taskbar also resulted in heroes using sticky notes or calendar reminders to keep track of which cases needed additional follow-up.

The Solution

KURU used Gladly to establish a single view of each customer across voice, email, chat, and SMS channels.

“The switch to Gladly has helped us lower our total volumes dramatically. The biggest reason is we see everything in a single conversation with the customer instead of separate tickets,” Ben Devey, Head of CX explains. “It’s the difference of looking between how many customers are contacting us vs. just the total number of contacts. That gains efficiency right there.”

Gladly’s task management tools also helped improve hero productivity, allowing KURU to manage seasonal surges. With the help of native collaboration functions, teams can now work cross-functionally on complex customer issues.

KURU also added Sidekick, Gladly’s Self-Service chat tool. The chat function has driven conversions from customers with high purchase intentions while reducing the volume of contacts with simple solutions.

The Outcome

KURU’s results from using Gladly exceeded the expected efficiency gains—a 40% drop in inbound volume even as sales increased.

And in less than three months, KURU was able to reduce its abandoned call rate by 3X.

Since using Gladly, improvement in customer satisfaction is most apparent from KURU’s Google Reviews. Almost every single reviewer spends as much time talking about KURU’s amazing customer service as they do the shoes they’ve purchased.

KURU is now positioned to make its already exemplary customer service team a legendary one.

Want a deeper dive into the KURU story? Join President & Integrator of KURU Footwear, Sean McGinnis, on balancing personalization with efficiency, and how leading with empathy acts as KURU’s golden rule of service.