How Bicycle Warehouse Reduced their Response Time from Hours to under a Minute with Richpanel
Challenge
On an average Bicycle Warehouse sees about 2,500 customer queries in a month, of which around 1000+ are via calls, and the rest 1400+ are via emails & chat. Their peak seasons are summer & the holidays, when queries usually go beyond 3,000 a month.
Initially, they used standalone chat software to field queries on their website, a phone line to field calls, and Zendesk to handle email.
But this made their support operations siloed and segmented. They struggled to answer and resolve queries coming in via social media quickly. Moreover, they couldn’t identify customer queries coming across multiple channels.
Handling returns was also proving to be a manual and time-consuming process. Due to siloed customer support operations, even resolving simple queries would take hours or days.
Solution
Brian identified the opportunity in consolidating his tech stack as multifold - reduce costs, time, and effort to resolve queries while elevating their customer experience by providing agents with the necessary customer context.
Enter Richpanel.
Unified Context, Uniform CX
With Richpanel’s Multi-Channel Support the support team at Bicycle Warehouse consolidated all the tickets coming in from the website, email, calls, & social media.
Richpanel simplified Bicycle Warehouse’s support operations by providing 360° customer context with its deep integration with Shopify.
Which helped Bicycle Warehouse provide a consistent support experience to all customers even if they raised the same query through multiple channels.
Personalized Automation
Their support team also realized that most tickets were simple queries on order tracking that did not need agent intervention. The rest were about returns, troubleshooting, and pre-purchase questions regarding their products, which required high-touch support.
Brian and the team initially had some concerns about automation, so they set it up for order tracking and part of the return process. It proved to be a great addition for them as the self-service widget on their website collected qualifying information about returns reducing back & forth between the customer and the agent.
Within returns, the most common issues were about the size & the type of their products. Setting up macros & power replies for each scenario allowed their agents to reduce average response times to around a minute while they achieved a first response time of 7 mins.
Revenue from Support
With Richpanel enabling them to achieve quicker response times Bicycle Warehouse unlocked additional revenue opportunities. A shorter turnaround for pre-purchase queries helped them quickly capitalize on the opportunity and convert it into a sale, which would’ve otherwise taken hours and led them to miss out on a potential sale.
With Richpanel’s support performance dashboard, they could measure the revenue impact of support. About 11% of conversations lead to a direct tangible revenue impact with a median conversion time of about 21 hours, roughly contributing to about 12% of their overall revenue.
Thanks to Richpanel, we're able to keep the team pretty lean. - Brian Ryder, Ecom Manager, Bicycle Warehouse
Bicycle Warehouse is an online & offline retailer based out of San Diego that sells bikes, parts, and accessories to bicycle enthusiasts everywhere. It was established 30 years ago, in 1992, by husband & wife duo Debbie & Mike Simmons. They’ve now expanded to 5 stores in California and sell all over mainland America through their e-commerce store and are looking to expand to Alaska, Hawaii & Canada in the next few years.
