Summary
- Zola is a wedding company that's reinventing the wedding planning and registry experience with a free suite of online tools supported by CX agents. → Over 2M couples have chosen Zola as their partner for their wedding planning journey. Zola’s backbone is not only the most innovative tools, but also the most insightful team of CX agents who are experts at supporting couples.
- Post-COVID, a surge in wedding booking and rescheduling prompted Zola to seek an AI solution to clear bottlenecks and free up agents to build customer relationships.
- Lang has given Zola’s CX team an even better understanding of customer sentiment. They’re able to laser target their value propositions, direct support where it’s most needed, and drive product development based on provable customer needs.
Key results
Reduction in average response time: 75% reduction in Average Time to Reply from 24 calendar hours to 6 calendar hours (only open in ET hours)
Savings in team managers’ time: 95% reduction in total management time organizing views for ticket routing in Zendesk — freeing up 400 hours a month for coaching and strategic projects.
Savings in agents' time: 1 minute per ticket — saving 450 agent hours per month, and giving them more time to nurture customer relationships.
Fewer escalations: 18% reduction in escalations, leading to higher retention and saving $6k/month in “make-good” credits.
New product releases: 10 successful releases a month as a result of specific customer feedback examples that CX has identified and reported to Product.
Background
Kade Clark leads the customer experience team at Zola as the senior director of customer experience. “As a support team, we handle transactional order management from an e-commerce perspective but we’re also advisors and advocates for the customer journey,” he explains, “Every interaction is unique. We might be helping a guest place a registry order. We might be advising a couple on how to navigate our software products or even giving advice on wedding traditions”
As a result, Zola empowers their CX team to advocate for users, both in the way they support them and also internally, ensuring the product team is building the best experiences to make sure that those journeys are a success.
The challenge
With venues reopening as the peak of the coronavirus pandemic passed, Zola saw a big surge in inquiries, both from couples new to the wedding journey and those rescheduling weddings that they had to then postpone. “As COVID restrictions loosened, we basically saw a rush of new and rescheduled events,” Kade explains.
Volumes doubled, and Zola had to act fast, growing its CX headcount to support couples going through a difficult rescheduling situation or those getting married under very special circumstances. But each agent could only handle so many contacts at a time.
There was a bottleneck of agents needing more time to ramp up their educational expertise but also their skills in handling the complex issues of rescheduled events. That meant managers had to shift focus away from manually operating organizational efficiencies, to supporting their agents — leading to a backlog or surplus of contacts.
The solution
“That was the pivotal moment for me,” Kade recalls, “I began to consider the opportunity of leveraging not only AI but also system automation to help us scale and essentially eliminate a lot of those backlogs. And we needed systems in place that would work regardless of volume and seasonality, in case of similar situations arising in future.”
“I’d always viewed Lang as a piece of technology that would help as sort of a “nice to have” — but the way our CX budget was structured, headcount and software were very separate and headcount was always the priority,” Kade says,
“Speaking with the team at Lang I realized we could potentially eliminate those bottlenecks entirely, which is not something I could do before — no matter how many star agents I had.”
Implementation and time-to-value
For Kade, Lang’s ability to free up many of his managers and human agents to focus on building relationships with Zola’s customers was a major driver in his decision to implement. And he was impressed at the speed and efficiency of the process.
“The team was there every step of the way—and proactively in the sense that I didn't know, I needed them to be there in the ways that they were. That deep understanding of the way that these systems work and the changes to triggers and automations that could be implemented were really where I saw value in the implementation period. And also the fact that it took very little implementation time because of the way that it's built.”
He remembers seeing tangible benefits right from day one, commenting, “I think from the true launch of getting our triggers set up to when we started seeing value, it was almost immediate.”
Then and now - how Lang has impacted CX at Zola
“In terms of Zendesk triggers and automation, it's been an absolute game changer in terms of the user experience for me as the manager and administrator of our environment,” Kade explains. He shared four key improvements that his team has already identified since implementing Lang.
1. A more complete understanding of customer sentiment.
Prior to Lang:
Zola had been using Zendesk macros, which were only as effective as the triggers that the team had created and required continual manual adjustment and updating. That led to gaps in their understanding of customer sentiment, with potentially valuable information slipping through the net.
After implementing Lang:
Those gaps have been eliminated. Kade’s team has full sight of what the customer sentiment and use case is in each of their conversations.
“We can surface a suggested phrase to an internal user who can then give a value proposition or a set of instructions to a customer,” he explains, “or automate help articles or links on how customers should interact with our tools. We can’t replicate that in every interaction without a system like LANG.”
2. A significant saving in management time to gain insights.
Prior to Lang:
Senior management at Zola would have to spend valuable time speaking to individual agents and managers on a daily basis for updates on current customer sentiment, or building clunky custom reports in Zendesk Explore.
After implementing Lang:
The time needed to glean insights from our customer feedback has dropped dramatically. Lang gives leadership an at-a-glance view of conversation content — as Kade remarks, “We can very easily see what people are talking about and how many people are talking about it and in what way just by using Lang.ai”
3. Accurately categorizing customer feedback — without guesswork.
Prior to Lang:
Managers would have to manipulate raw data in Excel to attempt to come up with addressable buckets. As Kade says, “It was days worth of someone's time going through thousands of tickets every single month, then surmising what that problem might be based on limited information. It felt a bit nebulous as a basis to direct our product team.”
After implementing Lang:
Lang has dramatically increased Kade’s confidence that his CX team knows what they need to focus on — and what customers are struggling with. “We can very easily see what people are talking about and how many people are talking about it and in what way just by using Lang.ai”
4. Driving successful product changes from customer feedback.
One example is a recent change to Zola’s checkout flow for their gift registry, as Kade explains, “One piece of feedback that I got from Lang is that a lot of less tech-savvy wedding guests were having trouble searching for and selecting certain types of gifts.
I could see that a lot of these actually had similar phrasing “I can't check out”, ”I have a checkout issue” or “Can you help me place my order?”
Prior to Lang:
“Before I wouldn't have known to look for that language in that example, I might only search for ‘checkout’ or ‘order failure’,” Kade admits, “I couldn’t always get a handle on all the possible variations.”
After implementing Lang:
With the Lang interaction, all of that work is done automatically. As a result, Zola made a couple of tweaks to their checkout and increased the conversion rate for guests as a result of that small change. “I wouldn't have known that without going through that insight process,” Kade says.
Moving forward
And that’s not an isolated instance. Kade tells us that Zola now launches around 10 new product releases a month directly influenced by tangible examples that the CX team has handed over to the product team — adding significant value to the product and continuously improving the customer journey.
“The next horizon,” Kade predicts, “is leveraging even more automation, to think even more proactively about customer needs. That’s the part I’m most excited about - CX as a revenue driver, pushing long-term company goals.”
