Deckers Customer Service Team Slashed Customer Wait Times

The Challenge

Deckers is the parent company of several popular shoe brands, including Ugg, Hoka One, Teva, and Sanuk.

With more than 140 retail locations and multiple eCommerce sites, Deckers has a substantial customer service operation. Their previous ticket-based CRM system wasn’t capable of achieving Deckers' objective to “get it right for customers, every contact, every time.”

Wait times were longer than executives wanted, especially during peak holiday seasons. And it wasn’t easy for Deckers customer service heroes to link multiple tickets to the same customer. As a result, customers had to track down their order history and retell their stories every time they connected with customer support.

Finally, their platform didn’t support the robust analytics the customer service team needed to identify trending issues in their operation.

Gladly allows us to be more agile, adapt to demand, and focus less time on management and reporting and more time on our team members and customers.

Bryan Riter
Director of Customer Care, Deckers

The Solution

Deckers sunset their ticketing system in favor of Gladly’s all-in-one, comprehensive customer support platform. Deckers customer service agents can now see a customer’s entire conversation and order history across all channels and respond to the most recent correspondence using the customer’s preferred communication method.

Following recommendations from Gladly’s team, Deckers invested heavily in expanding the capabilities of their SMS and chat channels.

The biggest success in the Deckers-Gladly partnership was the integration of Gladly’s Answers knowledge base. By using Answers as a single source of truth, Deckers ensured that customers received the most current, accurate answers to their questions, regardless of the channel they used.

Answers significantly reduced call volumes, and the native reporting functions also helped the leadership team identify trending issues and update their FAQs accordingly.

The Outcome

By gaining a more holistic view of their customers’ entire experience, Deckers has been able to fully realize their customer-first philosophy.

Switching to Gladly allowed heroes to provide a higher level of service in a shorter period of time. In fact, it only took a month for Deckers to see service levels improve by 40% and achieve their goal of low wait times across all channels.

SMS contacts increased 10x in one year, which dramatically lowered call volume and made it possible for heroes to maintain productivity numbers, even during peak shopping events like Cyber Monday. And with customer search success rates of 90%, Deckers brands boosted their reputations as responsive, customer-centric companies.

Through technology, data, and some key features, we’ve been able to improve service levels and create a dramatically different customer experience.

Bryan Riter
Director of Customer Care, Deckers