Automation at Scale: How to handle 1,000+ Daily Support Tickets #LTM145

Most retailers, if you went and spoke to your customer support team today and asked them what are the top three things that are happening, they will tell you straight away they know they're dealing with this every day and you probably will be surprised.

Right.

In terms of what you would hear.

So sometimes it's that simple.

Engaging with your, with your support team.

What's going on?

Let's talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lohmer and Vana V. Dichter.

Welcome back to Letstock Marketplace.

It's Ingrid again and it's great to have you with us today.

Today we've got a very hands on topic for you because if you're selling on marketplaces, I'm sure you know the feeling.

You lock in and there is a wall of customer tickets waiting for you, you know, and yeah, it's not that easy to keep track of everything that customers want, especially if you're active on several marketplaces.

So today we are going to talk about customer service on marketplaces, especially on multiple.

And how to turn these daily support headaches into a real growth engine.

Yeah.

And to help me break this down, I've got two great guests with me today.

So yeah, I'll be looking at this from different angles, I'd say.

So I'm really thrilled to welcome Irene from patemba.com Irene is quite a powerhouse on the operational side, which is just talking about what she's doing on marketplaces, which is a lot, I think more than 100 global marketplaces or something.

Oh, a hundred thirty at the moment.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Really looking forward to say, to hear what you're going to say about that.

And yeah, and joining her is the man providing the technological backbone for that kind of scale.

And that's Gareth from Edesk.

Yeah.

So really great to have both of you on the show.

Welcome.

Thank you.

It's great.

Ingrid, thanks for having us on.

Okay, right, so to start that off, I say, yeah, let's first have few introductions.

So, Irene, who are you?

What are you doing?

What is Potemba.com and why haven't I heard of you before if you are active on more than 100 global marketplaces.

So my name is Irene.

At the moment I'm the operations support manager.

But I'm.

I worked for over 12 years in customer service with Patemba.

Started small as a customer advisor, customer service advisor, then grew into the normal steps like team lead supervisor went, then as customer service manager and only the last year I have left customer services really and are looking more at the operational Side, petemba is a middleman for brands that want to see how their products really are accepted by customers all over the world without having to invest in to their own customer service volume, really.

And that's where Edis comes in for us, because we wouldn't be able to sell brand products over 130 marketplaces without having the back support of Edesk, who brings all the customer inquiries into one platform.

And that's great, really.

Okay, right, so that led nicely over to Gareth.

So, Gareth, who are you and who is at Edesk?

Yeah, well, thanks.

You explained the product very well, maybe better than even I can explain it, so thank you for that.

Yeah.

I'm Gareth Cummings.

I'm the CEO of Edesk.

I've worked in the company for nearly eight years.

I started off actually as the cto, so I looked after the technology and the product and then in the last 15 months or so, kind of stepped up and be CEO as a business.

Edesk, as Irene says, focuses on helping E commerce sellers who sell online do customer support.

And typically these sellers sell on multiple different locations, be it marketplaces, but also D2C and even these days, social channels like TikTok Shop and so on and so forth.

And yeah, as Irene says, we essentially connect to all those platforms and pull all the messages and all the orders into a single inbox and that allows you as a team then to respond to all those different queries across those different channels.

So that's really what we do in Edesk and that's what we focus on.

Okay.

Leaves just one question open, Irene.

How did an Austrian girl make her way to Nottinghamshire?

Oh, my God.

I think opening Europe borders was really the trigger point for us.

And at the time my kids were babies, really, and we decided we want to go where we can grow and ended up in Nottinghamshire.

That's really cool and quite fitting for an international story, as is the one of the template as well.

Okay, so, yeah, thank you to the both of you then.

I think we are set to have an interesting conversation about the world of customer service on marketplaces, which we will start right into after a very short advertisement break.

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Okay then I guess let's dive into it.

So maybe to start out with with Irene, why don't you tell us a bit about your business on marketplaces and especially how that looks in the customer service area.

So what are we talking about here?

How many customer tickets do you have a day?

I mean how many different marketplaces and how different are they?

So what is like the the main challenge here for you?

So we are dealing with over thousand customer emails daily.

Oh really?

Our challenges is we have a lot of marketplaces that have different SLAs.

Response times are with Australia, Japan at completely different time zones as well.

And if you would need to log in and out of marketplaces, even if it takes only a minute, a minute times 130 is already a lot of time gone.

Really not possible to do.

And we started small using Gmail really to begin with, then branched out into different options and finally ended up with Edesk which really helps us to bring everything in.

It also helps us to scale important tickets to make them priorities.

So we are not working at a first come first serve basis.

It's set for customer to hear but unfortunately marketplaces dictate that.

And some marketplaces say we want our tickets responded within 48 hours, some come and say you need to respond within 24 hours.

The next one comes.

We have marketplaces that expect a reply within seven hours.

So that already brings the need to filter the incoming emails by priority.

And with Edist we can set our own SLAs per marketplace which helps us then to really look on a timely frame which tickets need to be addressed to stick with the marketplace targets.

Really

Gareth, I think Irene has already touched upon the complexity that is behind these customer support doings on our marketplaces.

So is that something that sellers often underestimate?

Yes, I think so.

I think Irene explained it very well actually.

Each marketplace has its own rules and quirks, I guess, in terms of how they operate.

And you know, typically you're not owning that customer relationship in a marketplace.

It's true to marketplace where you're providing that support.

And in fact, on certain marketplaces, if you don't adhere to Those standards, those SLAs or those response times, you can actually be essentially punished or downgraded on those picture marketplaces.

So not only does it impact the customer experience, it actually impacts your business.

So when you're selling on marketplaces, you need to think of it as the support element, as actually part of the core infrastructure.

Because again, if you don't respond, if you don't adhere to those SLAs, then you can actually downgrade your ability to sell on those platforms.

And I think that it's not always apparent to sellers when they are entering those marketplaces to kind of how those rules work and how that particular ecosystem is.

I mean, could you look into this in a bit more detail?

So how do SLAs and platform rules and all the account health mechanisms that you have to look after, how they do, they affect the way that your support is structured now.

So maybe can you give us a few examples that go into a bit more detail?

Yeah, definitely.

When you start playing on different marketplaces, really you need to restructure how your team really works.

They are not really solely customer service agents with a nice soft skill.

They also need technical skill.

They need the knowledge behind really what each marketplace expects.

We have marketplaces that expect a reply in the customer's language, for example.

So you need to have a system in place to be able to respond in that language at a level that's understandable.

On the other hand, also look into social rules, for example, because yes, in English you have the you which is used for both personal and polite.

Other languages like German have a polite version and a personal version.

If you would mix them up.

We had that before.

Customers don't look kindly at things like that.

So really important and what we tend, we have a knowledge base in the background which is huge really because 130 marketplaces, some leaving, some coming, nobody can remember everything of that one.

So having this knowledge in the back for everybody to look into when they need to, when they are not hundred percent sure, is that marketplace now a free return for a customer, a paid return for a customer, you need that Backup for your team to make them successful, really.

It's also the option of templates that edesk provides.

So 90%, I would say of our communication is really the standard thing.

Where's my order?

I want to cancel my order.

What's my tracking number?

How do I return my order?

And there templates are a time saver really because A, you have a format that's suitable for all your marketplaces.

Second, you don't get the tone wrong and it's done within 30 seconds really with Edesk.

So we don't type really the standard replies out every time.

That will take quite too much time for the agents.

So templates is really to look into and once it goes over the template stage, there is where our agents really are needed.

The personal touch, maybe a solution that's out of the rule book, if I would say so, to make customers happy, to get a nice feedback, things like that.

Gareth, can you elaborate on that?

Especially this multi stages that Irene just touched upon.

So how do we decide what kind of customer queries are just the standard stuff that can be maybe even automized and when do we escalate in higher stages?

And is that different on different marketplaces as well?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it's also, it can be different depending on the, the seller as well.

But as Arlene says, I think typically where you can use automation is things like, where's my order?

I want an invoice, you know, where's the tracking?

Those standard type of queries that come in all the time and they typically come in on all different marketplaces.

So they're the ones where you look to use automation because you want to answer them quickly and you want to take, you know, you want to take the load off the team, as I already mentioned already as well, you have customers or consumers in different time zones and different locations.

So, you know, it could be, you know, noon at their time when they send you a query, but it could be 3am in terms of where you're located.

So automation can play a real role in terms of that quick response time in that, in the, in the 247 global world that we live in and alongside that multilingual capability as well.

Right.

Because if you have to build up that language skill with it when your team, that's, that's very difficult.

Not only do you have to find the languages you need to think about, you know, because if you have a German speaker, but they go on holidays, what are you going to do for the two weeks when you know, so it's not just, it's not just a single person.

Right.

So I think that's where the, the multilingual capability within our platform obviously can help in terms of that scale and that global scale.

And what we ultimately still believe in, the edesk that allows then your customer support team to be able to be focused more on higher value tasks in terms of dealing with more complex queries, VIP customers or even focusing on maybe what's driving some of the queries that are coming in to the support team.

So like what are the problematic areas?

So you can feed that back to the business.

So is there a particular product or SKU that has a high level of returns, for example, or maybe there's some negative reviews coming in a certain product range.

So when you're, when your support team have more time to focus on those and feed that back to the business, that's actually leads from a much better overall experience for your customer.

Um, but if your team is very busy just doing the, without using automation, just, just trying to respond manually, that's difficult because, because every day is just, you know, they're, they're, they're nearly firefighting, you know.

So we see it as use automation to you know, help you automate the routine queries and then yeah use, then you can use your team then to focus on more high, high value items and that, that becomes a good feedback loop within, within the overall business of what's going on.

I like to, yeah.

On top of Garrett's, where I want to add customer service wise is as a company you see, should see your customer service team as the watchdog of the company, which I class it as that because they are at a point where they will know first if a product has problems.

They will know first if a carrier is not performing as they should, they will know first if they're is anything going on because they receive the feedback.

And you really have to rely on an open and free conversation with your customer service team to be successful really on your marketplaces they have to look over how is the marketplace performing, are we close to breaching any SLAs?

And then you have to attack, adapt really you have to maybe change your SLAs and make a marketplace that normally wasn't that of a priority, your priority to keep that marketplace alive.

Really.

And really to say your customer service team is your alarm.

Yeah, we really believe in that in terms of putting the customer service team at the heart of the business because yeah, I, I see it sometimes and you know if, if Hannah Irene says they're, they're every day they're hearing from your, from your customers.

If you just think about that, right, that, that, that feedback loop that has come into your business every single day is really, really valuable.

Right.

And I think I see sellers and E commerce sellers, the more successful ones, put, put the customer at the heart of the business because, because that feedback is so, so important and often, sometimes you see it kind of being pushed to the side or something as, as, as not as important, but it's so important and it helps you drive that repeat business and you know, that kind of flywheel.

So yeah, I, and the successful businesses, I see that all the time in terms of that it is, it is put at the heart of the business.

I'd definitely like to go into this a bit deeper a bit later, but before like how customer service feeds back into your business because I think this is something that many retailers just don't follow up on as much as they could.

But before we go there, let's talk about the first thing that has to happen before we can even think about utilizing the support in this kind of way.

And that is automation.

Because Irene, earlier you said you're using the templates that EDESK is offering for answering all these standard questions and stuff like that.

So how far does automation go in these standard customer support area?

And can you hand that over completely to an optimization, maybe even to an AI or is that something that still has to have a human have a look on it?

So how do you deal with the standard questions at Patemba?

So yes, a lot of our answers customers get are automated because it doesn't need the input of a customer service agent.

Because with edesk we have the data all in one place when an order is shipped and a customer wants to know what's my tracking number?

What's the carrier?

We don't have an agent looking at that one.

That's an automated response from EID squarely saying like okay, on that order, that's the tracking number.

Put that in a pre created template, send it to the customer.

We have 130 marketplaces, but we have a very tiny customer service team really in comprehensive.

How many people do you have anyway?

Eighteen, I think at the moment.

Okay.

For over 100 marketplaces.

Wow.

Yes.

And that's only possible with a, having a support team, a support program that takes away the need of manpower really that can do this reoccurring tasks.

And also we learned, yes, we have native speakers in our customer service team that Helps us with some inquiries where we need it, but they are all cross trained so everybody can answer every email.

Which means even if I speak English and German that comes in a Czech, a Polish, a Spanish ticket, we can reply in our native language.

Edesk translates that automatically into the customer language.

Also the other way around when it comes in, it's translated into the language we understand and with that we can really make sure no agent is overwhelmed with volume and it's split evenly across the team.

And if one agent is sick on holiday, we don't have that hole and the scramble to not hitting the SLA because we don't have that skill in our team.

Gareth, how much is AI doing for this standard part of customer service at the moment?

We're seeing more and more adoption.

We built AI in the product.

It doesn't seem like 10 years ago but we originally because we recognized in, in, in E Commerce in particular those, those standard, you know, probably on average when we look at it maybe 70 or 70, 80 of queries around maybe 10 categories like where's my order?

I want to return, you know, the things we're speaking about.

Obviously things have surpassed that in recent times with OpenAI and chat GDP and stuff like that.

So now we plug into, into some of those LLMs and that helps us, helps us drive adoption and we're seeing quite a lot of usage on, on across our customers.

But again it's, it's, it's the same thing we're speaking about.

It's just in terms of really to automate and scale.

I mean it's so impressive.

Listen to Irene like 130 marketplaces.

I think you said a thousand a day.

Is that what you said?

A thousand queries coming in a day?

It depends per day.

We know it's not always like fluctuating if something happens in a, in a country, if there are floods, if there are winds, if the Australia had recently wildfires so the carriers couldn't deliver to customers and you would be surprised how many customers don't know what's going on in their own country.

I mean they have wildfires in front of their door and are concerned why the parcel is not on time.

Are you then adjusting the automated messages like because like your parcel is late because dude, there's a wildfire.

How do you do that?

Yes.

So there comes the human part in again.

We are on top of our carriers.

We get regular information from our carriers saying like there are delays due to bad weather or wildfires and it's a quick going into a template, putting it in, making sure every customer has that information and you go on and once that's, the fires are extinguished, you go in, you take it out thing done.

Yeah, that's, that's where we're seeing, it's a great example of where automation could play a role in AI in terms of the ability to.

When you have, when you have those lots going on in the world these days.

So you have those events that happen and you have the spike in tickets or we see in customers.

Obviously there's different peak times, be it obviously the obvious ones are like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But for some of our customers peak times could be the summer, like they could be selling outdoor camping.

Right.

So March, April, May might be their, their peak period.

And historically they might have had to hire temporary staff to help during those peak periods, but now they, they tend to use the AI and the automation to help get through that peak.

They still have their core team, so they still use their core team, but they're able to handle those peaks troughs without, without some of that.

And that's, that's a great benefit because the and Irene will notice better than me the operational overhead of trying to ramp a team in a short period of time and deal with all that is complex.

So I think that's where we're seeing the ability to handle those peaks and troughs easier and that helps in terms of AI and automation.

Okay.

Right.

I'd like to return to the question on how customer support can help grow your business or help even change your business.

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Yeah, as I said, I'd like to come back to some things Irene, that you said before, which is how customer support is sort of.

Yeah.

The baseline of your business and feeds back all the customer feedback into your own business.

So can you give us a few examples on how this.

Yeah.

How improving the support had a real measurable impact for your company.

So as I said, I started as a customer service agent.

So I went through all the stages and I learned where I personally struggled really to be heard or where I thought that's not really working because before we were splitting markets like language really and things like that and over our biggest business is over Christmas with a lot of customers ordering and we had areas where the people we had for that language were not enough, just not enough.

And training somebody for that period of time, you either had to bring them in early into the business, which costs a lot of money, then train them to learn all these marketplaces, to have them for maybe a month or two and then go back to your normal level of agents and that's not a feasible.

And second training takes a lot of time away from your day to day tasks really.

And we really looked into.

So over the whole year we have our agents at a 80, 85% level.

I would say yes, you can stretch that over peak and they will do more.

But you can't hold that for long.

You can hold it for the two months with support of automatization and templates and everything.

But if you keep that going, you would burn them out.

So the help of Edesk helps us to now hit the SLS as we need them.

Don't overwhelm a tiny part of our customer service team.

We can split that evenly over the whole team.

And since then we have, since we made all these changes, we are quite successful and are able to hold our SLAs even over during peak periods.

Gareth, you said before how if the customer support has enough time to really listen to the customer because they are not stuck into answering tens of thousands of queries of where is my parcel?

Then things can happen and things can feed it back into the company itself and maybe change a few things inside how you present your products or even the products themselves.

Maybe.

Can you give some examples, some real life examples from your customers maybe where that happened?

Absolutely.

I've seen it quite often actually.

Quite often our customers will be have a top selling skew, so it might be top selling sku and that's, it's so to a certain lens that's a very success, successful product that they're very happy with.

But when they surface the data, and this is some of the data we would surface in Edesk, when they look at stuff like maybe negative reviews that are coming on that particular product or negative CSAT or just general sentiment, they actually understand that actually that product, even though it's a top selling product, has been returned high and is actually driving to a lot of negative reviews coming back in the marketplaces.

And that obviously that's not the experience you want to give to your customer, but also actually that impacts your ability to sell on that particular marketplace because if your ratings drop, if you have higher refunds and returns coming back in, that actually affects your overall sale.

You know, where you would rank and how you can push in those picture marketplaces.

So not only is it a negative customer experience, it also actually is impacting your ability to sell.

So that's a very simple use case.

But when I see.

You'd be surprised how often I actually see that in terms of retailers are not aware of that.

So when we speak about that feedback loop back to the business, it is those.

If you went, most retailers, if you went to, spoke to your customer support team today and asked them what are the top three things that are happening, they will tell you straight away they know, right, they're dealing with this every day and you probably will be surprised, right, in terms of what you would hear.

So sometimes it's that simple.

It's, you know, engaging with your, with your support team, what's going on?

I mean, I mean obviously I'll talk about Edesk and the platform and all the things that you can surface, but also speak to your, speak to the customer support team who are speaking with your customers on a daily basis.

I think that's important.

There's a big brand in the uk, Gymshark, and they're very successful and stuff like that.

And I, I noticed during the week that this customer support team reports directly into the CEO, you know, so you know, puts it very much at the, at the, at the heart of the business.

Right.

So I think for me it, sometimes it is, it is that simple.

Like they're, they're very important part of your business.

So speak to them, engage with them and make sure that's happening in the business.

You know, Irene, from your experience as a customer service agent, is that something that is happening?

Is the CE area of a company often talking to customer support agents or have you not been heard?

Not as much as I would like to, but.

And it varies, I assume from company to company.

But when we started and we had the owner of the company even go in, answer emails, look what's going on.

And even if you don't do that, just take the time as upper management sit beside an agent, you don't have to answer the things, listen what's coming in, listen what the agents tell you and you will have a better understanding.

Really.

And yes, we do that especially after peak.

We have our time where we want the feedback.

What went well, what didn't go well, where are the problems?

What were the problems?

And we learned out of these.

And each year we are performing better by listening to our customer service teams.

Really?

I think I take that as your final word then, Irene, because like, listen, please listen to your customer service team because they do know.

Gareth, maybe last question to you because that is the quality aspect of it.

Yeah, listen to the customer team.

But if you want to find out if your customer support is up to par at the moment, is there a metric that you should begin tracking right away, next Monday or anything else that you can use to find out if your customer support at the moment is up to par or if you need maybe help.

Yeah, I think Irene, I think mentioned already SLAs.

So what are your response times?

That's a very powerful metric.

But it will tell you a loss.

Right.

And again, you'd be surprised sometimes if you're not tracking it and then you discover actually it can be days or longer sometimes.

I see.

But you know, so, so I think that's the first metric you should, you should look at how quickly are we getting back to our customers and that will tell you a lot.

Hopefully you're pleasantly surprised.

But sometimes you may, may not be, but it's.

But that's the first step.

Once you know that you can, you can set about trying to rectify that.

And from there I think that that will lead you down a good path.

So yeah, I think if it's one metric that's a, that's a starting metric to, to start to track and it's important.

And again, I reiterate, for a lot of marketplaces, if you're outside of their SLAs, you, you will be penalized.

It will affect your sales performance.

Okay.

So you fix that.

That should help in terms of your, of your, your sales and growth as well.

On marketplaces, I would also say your average response time per ticket helps you as well to find downfalls where you don't have enough technical support.

Really, for the customer service team, I would go away for one and done.

Really?

Because out of own experience, one and done is a nice target to watch.

But the minute a customer emails back thank you, your one and done is gone.

Okay.

And when I started, we were monitoring one and done, and there was always the question.

So one and done meaning like one answer and that's one answer and no customer.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

The minute it comes.

Yes.

I always say thank you when someone

is helping me, which might make you.

I'm sorry about that.

Yes.

You get penalized for making a customer happy.

That's an interesting point.

Never thought about that.

So here are my apologies to all the customer support people that I ruined the statistics by just saying thank you.

I'm really sorry about that.

Yeah, we should definitely change that.

Yeah, I like that.

I love that.

That was a really interesting look into the world of customer support and especially the details and nitty gritty things that happen here.

So thank you very much, Irene and Gari, for this episode.

Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

Right.

And yeah, if you enjoyed all that, let us know how you deal with your customer service challenges.

Looking forward to your input here.

And do tune in next time again.

And don't forget to like and subscribe.

You know how it works.

Yeah.

Thank you very much and bye bye.

You listened to let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Valerie Dichtel.