From Zendesk to eDesk: How Hickies Scaled Customer Support

Gaston Frydlewski always felt there was a better way to tie his shoes, so in 2012, he  founded Hickies, a stretchy alternative to shoelaces. Today, Hickies high-performance elastic “laces” are sold in over 50 countries around the world, including the U.S., Argentina, Japan and the U.K.. They sell on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and on their Shopify website.

Hickies felt that their current customer support solution was stifling growth

They grew fast, but their customer support software couldn’t quite keep up, and they found themselves needing a more streamlined customer support solution to effectively cater to their growing global customer base. So they set out to find an alternative to Zendesk.

“It was very difficult for us to see if a support ticket was coming from the U.S., from Europe or from Asia, or even what channel it was coming from,” Virginia says, adding, “We also couldn’t reply directly from some channels and the option to forward a message to another team member was not very user-friendly.“

Not to mention, a growing business meant an expanding customer support team, and Virginia quickly realized that training new hires to use Zendesk was taking too long because the system was so complex. Difficulties with training often resulted in support tickets being missed, an oversight Hickies couldn’t afford as they tried to grow their business.

“Every time a new agent joined the team, he or she needed to get familiarized with Zendesk and because it’s not very user-friendly, there would always be issues and we would miss tickets,“

Hickies needed more than just a ticket management system

First impressions are important, especially for a growing eCommerce business that does not yet have the benefit of brand recognition to back it up. For that reason, the ability to respond to queries quickly was critical to customer relationship building. A slow response – or worse, no response at all – built distrust, hurting the brand’s reputation and future sales.

“We have to handle every issue that our customers have, both on our own website and on the marketplaces we sell on, everything from questions like ‘When is my order going to arrive?’ to ‘I want to exchange this color for another one.“

Additionally, Hickies needed a customer support solution that preserved the human element in their interactions with customers. 

“Whenever we have a ticket from social media, like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, we want to respond within three hours of receiving that message and we don’t want to sound like a robot.”

They also wanted to offer complete transparency to their customers when resolving issues in order to foster stronger relationships. Having centralized visibility over customer order details, including shipping information, was crucial to providing  accurate responses, quickly.

“We can’t control DHL, but we can provide our customers with the best support and help them with whatever they need.”

One Connected Solution for eCommerce Support

After weighing the pros and cons of other solutions on the market, the company realized an ecommerce help desk was the answer to its specific set of customer service problems. Ultimately, that’s why Hickies made the switch from Zendesk to eDesk. 

“Since we are growing a lot, we really need a platform that works, that has different types of ecommerce-focused features and that can easily be used by our customer service team.”

Connectivity was one of the main features that caught the attention of the IT team, and Virginia says it’s made the greatest difference to her support agents’ productivity. Virginia explains.

 “Having all that information in the main page is really useful because it helps my agents to manage their time and prioritize support tickets.”

Plus, the auto-translation feature gives the support team the ability to communicate in every language. Most of Hickies’ sales come from its own ecommerce site that services six different regions: the U.S., UK, Brazil, Germany, France and the EU at large. That means the support team has to field queries from customers in all of those markets, potentially written in different languages.

“If you sell in a lot of countries, you need to have everything connected.”

Another favored feature was auto-assign and pre-built templates. After all, collaboration is key to answering queries quickly and Hickies’ agents streamline their support queue by assigning the relevant agent to each ticket and sharing the workload. 

Faster, personalized customer support

Since adopting eDesk, Hickies have seen a major improvement in their customer service operations due to a combination of connected features helping Virginia and her team to provide excellent ecommerce customer service.

One feature the support team found beneficial was eDesk’s user-friendly dashboard which has reduced time spent figuring out which tickets need to be prioritized. 

“My team members like that whenever they log in to their dashboard, they can clearly see if something is a new message, how much time is left in its SLA (service level agreement), and if it’s coming from Facebook, Amazon, Shopify or eBay.” 

Hickies also found eDesk’s integration with Shopify particularly helpful in cutting down response times. 

 “One of the greatest benefits of eDesk, for us, is that it can be connected to Shopify. So if I get a ticket from Shopify, I can immediately see which channel it came from and the order number of that client, without logging into another account.”

Ultimately, Hickies needed a solution that would grow with the business and improve ticket resolution times, without sounding like a robot. By using eDesk pre-built templates, the support team at Hickies were able to build customer response templates based on the customers preferred language, and auto-populate customer and order information for a personalized experience that didn’t over-extend their team.