At a global e-commerce retailer, the customer operation was heavily reliant on temporary staff during peak periods, which was expensive and slow due to time-to-competence. As a global brand with a large customer base in Germany, communication was also clunky – agents were manually copying and pasting into Google Translate to respond.

The company had consolidated from multiple 3PL warehouses in Germany and the US to a single UK location, and were using an expensive third-party shipper for global orders. Returns and exchanges through this provider were manual and time-consuming. Costs were high, the setup wasn’t scalable, and the customer journey was far from efficient.

I was tasked with:

• Improving and streamlining the end-to-end customer journey

• Increasing the Trustpilot rating to 4.8

• Reducing reliance on temporary staff at peak and making the model scalable

• Tackling the high cost and manual workload in global shipping and returns

I approached it on both the CX/operations side and the shipping/cost side:

CX & operations

• Implemented a new CRM, moving from a traditional helpdesk model to an intuitive, integrated system connected to Shopify, Trustpilot and social media, so the team could handle all queries from one place.

• Introduced self-serve options and built a multilingual customer help centre to deal with the most common / basic queries.

• Integrated an automatic translation tool so operators could read and reply to messages in 72 languages directly in the system, removing the need to copy/paste into Google Translate and speeding up response times significantly.

Shipping & cost

• Analysed the cost and performance of the existing third-party shipper, focusing on overseas shipping and returns.

• Partnered with our 3PL to review alternative options and model cost/benefit.

• Agreed a move to shipping via 3PL for overseas orders and returns, reducing cost per shipment and simplifying the returns and tracking process.

• Automated around 60% of enquiries during the first peak period, which meant we did not need any additional temporary staff.

• Achieved and maintained a 4.8 Trustpilot score with over 10,000 reviews, despite some ongoing product quality and sizing issues.

• Identified and delivered approximately £300k in annual shipping cost savings by moving overseas shipping and returns via 3PL.

• Significantly reduced manual workload around returns and shipping updates, and created a much more scalable, efficient customer journey.

• 3rd party delivery process
• Apparel
• analyst
• Customer Personalisation
• Customer Service Management
• customer experience strategy
• CRM Systems
• training

• BI & Analytics
• Digital Enablement
• Process Effectiveness & Automation

• Retail and Consumer