ShipHero Leverages Stylo to Improve the Customer Experience, Gain Visibility, and Impact Their Bottom Line

"When it comes to what we can do with Stylo, the possibilities are endless. I couldn't ask for a better partner."

<author>Jen Williams<author>
<author>Senior Vice President of Customer Success, ShipHero<author>

What ShipHero achieved with Stylo

• Gained automated insights allowing them to prioritize support tickets by churn risk
• Became confident and data-driven in their product roadmap and business decisions
• Reduced cost per support ticket by 30%
• Accelerated ticket response time

For ShipHero, the customer experience is everything. eCommerce companies rely on ShipHero to manage complex, time-sensitive fulfillment and shipping cycles. Their customers know all too well that a mishap or delay can domino into supply bottlenecks and unhappy partners.

Jen Williams is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at ShipHero. As a CS & Support executive, Jen works closely with Engineering and Product to achieve one core mission: improve the customer experience.

Challenge

Gain big-picture visibility into the customer experience

“The Engineering team needed to know the top drivers of customer frustration.”

<author>Jen Williams<author>
<author>Senior Vice President of Customer Success, ShipHero<author>

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After assuming her role, Jen started meeting regularly with ShipHero’s Engineering team. Each time they met, it seemed Engineering had the same question: What were the top trends in tickets? What patterns had Jen seen in the issues customers were reporting?

It was a reasonable question – which made it all the more troubling for Jen when she realized she couldn’t answer it. “The data I had was only as good as what was being categorized,” Jen says. “But tickets weren’t being categorized consistently or properly. There were gaps, there was cherry-picking. Engineering needed to know the top drivers of customer effort and frustration so they could know how best to improve the product. But I didn’t have that information.”

Jen knew this lack of visibility into the customer experience threatened not only her team’s efficacy, but also Engineering’s – and that, downstream, it threatened company leadership’s ability to make informed strategic decisions.

Solution

Leverage Stylo to uncover external and internal problem areas

Stylo provided visibility into:

• Common sources of customer frustration
• How much time and effort customers typically spend resolving an issue
• Which tickets have the highest impact and urgency
• The rate at which tickets are escalated to Engineering
• Instances of important tickets going unresolved

Jen’s team started leveraging Stylo’s Artificial Intelligence platform to analyze their customer support tickets, enabling them to uncover patterns in the issues their customers were reporting and categorize tickets based on the level of urgency and impact. Jen found particular value in Stylo’s integration with Zendesk, which allows ShipHero to automatically route and categorize tickets. “The goal was to better prioritize the issues our customers were experiencing, so Engineering would know how to make the biggest, and most immediate, positive impact,” Jen says. “We got insight into the overall volume of tickets, and what the most common drivers of frustration were. We also got a better sense not just of the issues our customers were experiencing, but of how much time and energy they were having to spend to resolve those issues.”

The Stylo platform didn’t just provide a better understanding of customer issues – it also gave Jen visibility into how her team was responding to them. “I’m able to better manage the team because I can pinpoint gaps in the team’s knowledge or training, and find room for process improvements. For example, Stylo shows me the percentage of tickets that are escalated to Engineering, which enables me to then decide whether I need to train the team so they don’t escalate as much, or work with Engineering to make sure issues are resolved.”

Jen found that the Stylo team was fully invested in her success. “Stylo is always available to help us get the most out of the system,” she says. “When it comes to what we can do with Stylo, the possibilities are endless. I couldn’t ask for a better partner.”

Results

Happy customers and data-driven decisions

Working with Stylo has given Jen’s team a holistic understanding of the customer experience, empowering ShipHero to take a smarter approach to addressing pain points. “When Engineering makes their product improvements, they can now prioritize the issues that have the biggest customer impact,” Jen says. “An issue that once might have taken months to address now gets moved to the front of the line.” This has led to concrete benefits for ShipHero:

• Customer satisfaction has increased
• The cost of support has dropped
• The team has accelerated their ticket response time

“When Engineering makes their product improvements, they can now prioritize the issues that have the biggest customer impact,” Jen says. “An issue that once might have taken months to address now gets moved to the front of the line.”

Jen’s experience with Stylo has also made her more confident when briefing the rest of ShipHero leadership. “My team has become better stewards of the business. We’re able to better articulate the needs of the customer, and we’re now making decisions based on data, not gut feelings,” she says. “It’s easy to think the sky is falling based on anecdotal reports of unhappy customers. But the visibility we’ve gained from Stylo helps put things in perspective, so we’re not making emotional decisions and steering the ship the wrong way.”

Recently, Jen told her COO that, after leveraging Stylo on the shipping side of the house, they now plan to bring Stylo in on the fulfillment side. The COO’s response? “I can’t wait.”