In this exclusive extract from our FREE 2024 Fashion eCommerce report, discover how Accent Group is revolutionising the way it speaks to customers across 30 unique brands.
Online revenue now makes up a fifth of Accent Group’s total retail sales. For the 2023 financial year, the segment reached $260.5 million, which is up from around $108 million reported for 2020.
And that’s not just noted at Accent Group, but across the entire retail landscape in Australia, where online retail trade has doubled over the last four years to an average monthly rate of about $3.7 billion according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
With a goal to push online sales to 30% of total yearly revenue, it’s no surprise that Accent Group began investing in the online customer experience. Today, this division comprises three customer experience (CX) centres located in Melbourne, Sydney and Durban in South Africa, with a total team size of 65 people. And those 65 people manage all online customer care across more than 30 different online platforms, each harnessing a unique tone, style, size and working model - from pureplays to multi-channel brands.
Accent Group head of customer experience Laura Cran says the key focus of these CX centres is to make the internal communication tools that enable seamless collaboration with other departments indispensable.
“Beyond these communication tools, our ‘Knowledge Base’ - which houses process frameworks and training materials - significantly contributes to keeping our team well-informed and empowered.
“Additionally, we leverage Zendesk SaaS to support our customers and have invested a lot of time in the setup and configuration of our CX helpdesk in recent times.”
One area the CX centres hones in on is digital interactions with customers. From May to August 2023, Accent Group transitioned online customer communications across all its digital platforms from antiquated chat to asynchronous messaging. In other words: from an outdated system that cleared chats after closing the browser and which required both parties to be online at the same time, to an on-demand style of messaging, where chats between customer and company can be executed and returned to in the customer’s preferred time.
“We really did have to hustle as we wanted to get that done before the Cyber [Black Friday] period,” Cran says.
The way its customer care messaging system works now is through extensive decision trees that allow customers to click through and validate their problem and be presented with bite-sized conversational options in reply.
“For us to build that for 30+ individual brands, and each of them have individual scripts, is a hell of a lot of work. And we have to think about the maintenance of that ongoing. We obviously want a good amount of customization, but then also enough consistency that we're able to maintain those as well.
“There's a lot of stakeholders involved in that process as well. For a few of our brands, there's international brand partners that we need to make sure that everything we're doing is in keeping with the brand guidelines.
Cran says the rollout of asynchronous messaging is a success based on customer responses. In fact, from Cyber weekend sales last year, Accent Group achieved a 10% increase in year-on-year customer satisfaction, with messaging wait times dropping from over 10 minutes to under 1 minute.
“It has [also] allowed us to efficiently handle basic inquiries and free up our agents for more complex situations,” Cran says.
“With our messaging widget, 75% of customers are able to resolve their query with the prompts that exist within that. So that keeps our agents available where they're really needed for those complex queries.
“It means that the speed for everybody improves, because we don't have this bottleneck of everybody trying to connect to a person.”
This was a key issue under the antiquated chat system, which Cran says was a little more siloed.
“We were really quite partial to putting customers into buckets,” she explained. “You know, ‘This is a pre-purchase inquiry, and this is a post purchase inquiry…’ and then to have a team ready to deal with those.
“But we can now see that those interactions can be pretty dynamic; that it might move from one to another. Our team are now upskilled to be able to handle that customer from start to finish. And there's a lot less handoffs to other team members.”
Cran says twelve months ago it wouldn’t be unusual to hear, ‘Oh, sorry, you’ve come through to the sales team, let me pass you over to the support team.’
“That was so painful for our customers. We don't have to do that anymore.”
However, some trialled technology isn’t as successful in the end. At the crux of the COVID-19 pandemic, Accent Group introduced video chat to connect customers to store staff when stores had limited capacity restrictions or couldn’t open altogether.
“So the concept was that customers could FaceTime us,” Cran says. “It was all powered through the messaging widget on the websites, and they would connect to an agent via a video call if they opted to, so that they could receive product recommendations.
“For a period of time, some of the Accent Group stores had these devices in store to be able to take those chats, as did our CX team in the Melbourne and Sydney offices as well.”
Over 31,000 customers had used the new feature in just 90 days. But as stores began to tentatively re-open, fewer and fewer people adopted it.
“It was quite an expensive piece of software, and it's obviously something really exciting to talk about. But if nobody's calling…”
“This underscores the importance of first understanding what our customers want before implementing new initiatives.
“It's easy to fall into the trap of presuming we know precisely what the customer wants. Particularly in the world of CX, where technology moves quickly, and the sales pitches are convincing.”
Looking ahead, Cran reveals that Accent Group’s CX team is eyeing artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Zendesk to further enhance its online helpdesk across brands. In particular, utilising AI to aid its agents rather than being generative or left on its own with Accent’s customers.
“We think that there's a real opportunity there for things like summarization, for instance,” Cran explains. “So often, our agents will pick up an inquiry that is quite complex. There may be a little bit of backwards or forwards, or perhaps they have inherited it when it reopens a few weeks later.
“So having the capacity to have that interaction summarized for them is obviously going to see some real speed efficiencies. But yeah, we’re certainly not leaving it on its own.
“The by-product of this investment is expected to be an elevated customer experience, as our customers will be supported by genuine experts empowered by top-notch tools.”
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