Riding your bike is fun, so buying one should be fun too. Mitzi Krone, senior director of customer service and sales support at Pacific Cycle, applies this strategy to her work delivering a better customer experience to those buying well-loved brands including Schwinn, Mongoose, and Kid Trax.
In 2015, Mitzi’s team adopted Salsify Chat (formerly Welcome Commerce) to support inbound questions directly from Walmart.com product pages. As a result they began getting CSAT scores 4.9 out of 5 stars and transformed their product pages and the ways in which the company takes products to market. During a recent webinar, Mitzi discussed her strategy and experience with Dan Herman, co-founder of Welcome Commerce (now Salsify Chat) and VP of Retail Strategy at Salsify.
Dan: Thank you so much for chatting today, Mitzi. Tell me about your background and role at Pacific Cycle.
Mitzi: I have been working with Pacific Cycle for about 23 years now. I lead the customer service department, which is both the presale order desk and the after sale warranty department. Our department handles pretty much all things interactive with the customer, whether it's systems, operations, tools like live chat.
Dan: What initially inspired you to deploy Chat?
Mitzi: We started in 2015 at the prompting of Walmart. They are our number one customer and we a large supplier of their bicycle business. They asked us to continue that industry leadership and see if Salsify Chat was a possible tool to help consumers. Back then, our product pages were a little thin, so there was lots of questions that I think Walmart was fielding directly. We would take over the phone, but lots of emails being generated on from pre-sale questions coming from their site.
Dan: What did you learn after initially implementing Chat?
Mitzi: With Salsify Chat we were getting all this consumer feedback. There were many general questions, people weren't able to find answers to on our product pages. Is this the right bike for me? How would I ride this bike? What's the frame size? We were able to capture these common questions and answer them not only in the moment but also on the product page for other shoppers.
Dan: Interesting. Did the types of questions you saw cluster around a particular area or did you see engagement across your product assortment?
Mitzi: It was running across the spectrum of all of our products and brands. We have multiple brands out there. Whether it was the $79 Roadmaster bike or the $200 Schwinn bike we were seeing a pattern of questions that bike people would know, but the average consumer may not. What’s a rider’s weight limit? Is there a frame size? Dd these tires work on gravel? That kind of thing.
Dan: I've always been fascinated by how Pacific Cycle created alignment across the entire organization with this voice of the customer data. Share how that was possible.
Mitzi: We've always had voice of the customer at the front of our organization, but having chat activated really brought it home to a lot of people here. We were able to share specific feedback from the consumer. It was like we were standing in the aisle with the consumer while they're making their buying decision. We were able to leverage that data across all of our department platforms, product development, marketing, and quality assurance.
We shared the information we learned with other divisions across the portfolio and it allowed us to collaborate a lot more effectively. Instead of it turning into a speculative or interpretive discussions we had chat transcripts. Everyone could see the actual back and forth between the consumer. It allowed everybody to hear it directly from the customer themselves and respond a lot faster to the feedback.
Dan: How did Salsify Chat allow you to react more quickly?
Mitzi: We were able to react to certain things in the marketplace, even faster. For example, one day we had a bunch of consumers asking about when a Fat Tire bike would be back in stock. We could see that Walmart was out of stock on it. The primary customer service representative that does the Walmart Chats sits maybe two cubicles away from the planner that handles the Walmart account. So literally she saw three back-to-back questions, got up, walked over there to discuss the issue. He switched it over so that we could ship direct-to-consumer and within a day it was back live and we were still shipping it.
As a result, people were getting product faster even when it was out of stock. It was that simple. You didn't have to get managers involved. It was people on the front lines are able to do their jobs better because they're having that conversation which was initiated from the chat content. On the flip side, we'd get emails about the out-of-stock and it would have been an eight-hour response time. Chat is immediate. Within 30 seconds you can identify what's going on for that consumer.
Dan: Do you use Chat to sell or upsell directly?
Mitzi: We sell bicycles for the most part, but we also have a full line of parts and accessories. We are first and foremost customer service folks not salespeople. We wanted to have a soft approach. When people were making their purchases, we would throw in things like, “Hey, don't forget about your helmet, you know, if you haven't replaced it in three years, now's a great time.” It felt more service related than a sales pitch. Chat really made it a lot easier to get upsells done. If somebody was buying a bike for a kid in college, we would throw out, “Hey, you probably want to get a lock with that.” It was surprising how easy that was to do and how well consumers responded to it. We sold a lot more without actually trying to sell stuff.
Dan: What have learned in terms of best practices for creating great experiences?
Mitzi: Bicycles are a very emotional product. You get on your ride and you feel great. We try to make and build an emotional connection with consumers, whether it's through phone call or email and now live chat. Having a personality so a shopper knows they're not talking to an automated bot, you're talking to a real person. We've got kids here, we use the product here, we've got our own personal experiences that we like to share.
We were able to work with the customer service representatives and build out that strategy over a period of time. I use the transcripts that are really good at personality as an example. How do you chat with someone and be professional yet personal? How do you connect with them on a human level? We limit the amount of templates that we use. We build out the templates specific to the retailer's requirements or policies, designed to be one or two lines. Then we pepper that in with the customer service rep really connecting with that consumer. We love it when people ask us questions because we get to show off our customer service skills.
Dan: How did you resource for Salsify Chat when you first started the program? What did you learn about optimizing it over time?
Mitzi: In the beginning we thought it would be thousands and thousands of contacts like phone calls and other support channels. So we actually added headcount: Two new positions just for live chat in 2015. The whole thing was pretty easy to roll out. It probably took more time for us to train our customer service rep than implement the technology. All told that it probably took us maybe two to three weeks to train our customer service representatives.
Since then we’ve eliminated those positions and absorbed chat with our existing call center. We probably get a few thousand chats a month, a single customer service representative can handle the volume. We found that someone can handle five chats at a time without dropping any service scores. With Salsify Chat we now have the ability to forecast how many chats to expect during which days of the week, and what times during those days.
Dan: What results did you see after implementing Chat?
Mitzi: We have a huge impact to our customer satisfaction scores. Like we were off the charts. It comes through okay on phones, but we never really scored really outside of four out of five stars. With Salsify Chat we started seeing CSAT scores upwards of 4.9. People were really getting a lot out of it. As our product pages started getting more robust, we saw a dip in our chat volume but our sales didn't change. That means consumers are finding what they needed.
Dan: Where do you see the opportunities from using Salsify PXM platform and Chat together?
Mitzi: We signed up with Salsify product experience management in order to enhance our digital footprint and bring consistency across all of our product pages. With the Salsify platform we could bring a better page to market so it was much more complete, much more detailed. For us it was all about consumer engagement. Like I said, bicycles are a fun activity. Are shoppers having fun when they're making that purchase decision?
Salsify really helped us deliver a better approach to presenting product to consumers. It's not just tech and spec, it's not just the marketing spin. It really kind of delivered a better voice to the customer back to them on the product. It was much more effective. The voice that we were able to portray behind that product was unique to the product. It stood out more. After awhile you start writing content, it gets kind of old quickly, so it gets a little stale. With Salsify, when you read those pages, it feels unique. It feels special. It feels like you have a better understanding of why that bike stands out amongst the many.
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