Global luxury fashion leader FARFETCH started working with Unbabel to relieve pressure on their customer service team, reduce turnover, and ultimately, increase employee happiness.
Highlights
FARFETCH believes in providing a best-in-class luxurious experience for their customers in their native language. They focus on establishing a local footprint in each market to build authentic relationships with their customers. FARFETCH uses Unbabel integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud to provide personalized native-language support to their customers around the world. Using Unbabel’s AI-powered Language Operations (LangOps) platform, the team has maintained their high CSAT and reduced agent workload considerably.
The Unbabel effect
- CSAT on par with when a small dedicated team was focused on a specific market
- Productivity increased by 8%, freeing up multilingual agent bandwidth to focus on making long-term improvements to the process and solving more complex problems
- Recruiting costs decreased by 4%, and the people team is relieved of the pressure to keep the recruitment pipeline going
- The opportunity to quickly and flexibly scale operations in a niche language without having to expand the team
About FARFETCH
FARFETCH is the leading global technology platform for the luxury fashion industry that sells products from more than 3,500 global boutiques and brands, including Gucci, Chanel, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Burberry, as well as thousands of independent designers. The only online global platform at scale for the $300 billion luxury fashion industry, FARFETCH is as much a technology company as it is a direct-to-consumer ecommerce site: The market-leader in e-commerce technology empowers several luxury brands and retailers to support their digital operations and deliver a seamless service.
At a glance
- 3 million active consumers across more than 190 countries
- Sells products from more than 3,500 luxury brands and boutiques
- 15 agents delivering stellar customer service in more than a dozen languages
The challenge
Maintaining a high standard for customer satisfaction and retaining the personal touch
When supporting more than three million customers across 190 countries in more than 12 languages, the FARFETCH support team encountered some roadblocks in the more niche languages. When one of FARFETCH’s niche language services proved to be challenging in terms of maintaining a coherent workforce, with high turnover, tackling SLAs, and maintaining their high standards for customer satisfaction and retention, they knew they needed to partner with a cutting-edge multilingual translation service that aligned with their values, while keeping their unique personal touch.
Relieving agents of excess workload and optimizing the employee experience
FARFETCH needed a customer service translation solution to help them relieve the pressure off the people team to keep the recruitment pipeline active in the long-tail languages and also keep the support team happier and more productive. They needed to increase support agents’ satisfaction and empower them with all the resources they needed to address a high volume of incoming support tickets while also keeping the backlog low.
The solution
Keeping the customer satisfaction flag flying high
Unbabel is not only a leader in highly accurate AI-powered machine translation technology, but the platform also comes with a skilled, global community of human editors continuously refining the translation. The ability to add this fast translation with a human touch to their CRM, Salesforce Service Cloud, turned out to be a gamechanger for the team.
For FARFETCH, the biggest priority has always been to deliver high-quality native-language customer service, with the translation quality improving from 4.5 stars out of 5. Through continuous fine-tuning with Unbabel, it was a seamless transition: The turnaround time for customer service translations has remained short, with no compromise to quality. Not only was Unbabel able to maintain high standards, but FARFETCH also saw an uptick in translation quality to 4.8 in a short period of time.
Ambition meets flexibility
FARFETCH’s goal of turning customer service into a profit center and an integral part of the truly luxurious customer experience could only be achieved with a cost-effective, highly scalable solution such as Unbabel. With Unbabel, Correia said, FARFETCH has been able to think of their support team as a dynamic element instead of static. Unbabel frees up agent bandwidth considerably, enabling FARFETCH to flexibly allocate resources to areas that need more attention, such as spikes in demand in any language at any point in time and seasonal peaks during Black Friday and other sale periods.
Using Unbabel has opened up new opportunities for FARFETCH, making it possible to scale customer service operations into new languages and take on more volumes of customer queries in a cost-effective manner. When expanding to new markets, FARFETCH can now go to market much faster while keeping recruitment costs low. For a global operation with the kind of reach and demand like FARFETCH, Unbabel has been an invaluable solution to help them thoughtfully scale quickly and solve complex problems with ease.
Happy employees are the greatest ambassadors
Unbabel’s tight-knit integration with Salesforce Service Cloud enabled the FARFETCH support team to quickly implement the AI-powered solution. “It was a pretty out-of-the-box process,” Correia said of the integration. With just a few minor adjustments and with the help of the robust partnership between Unbabel and Salesforce, they were able to arm their agents with even more information on customers. Not only that, throughout the onboarding and the first few weeks, the Unbabel team was always on hand to support the FARFETCH team, continuously customizing the product to meet their specific needs.
Before, the small team had to field customer queries and deal with backlogs of three to four days. But with Unbabel, translations only took between six and ten minutes, helping the team to drastically improve turnaround times and keep backlog under control.
Correia said that Unbabel has really helped them gain extra capacity without jeopardizing their customer satisfaction. The Language Operations platform has empowered the current team to handle a high amount of tickets than even a much bigger team could. This has significantly improved agent productivity and morale, letting them give each and every customer more specialized attention. Unbabel also gives FARFETCH highly tailored reporting, allowing them to monitor the most important data like translation time and quality with no hassle.
With Unbabel solving the challenges for one language, FARFETCH is working on adding more languages. Correia added, “This is a testament to the flexibility of the Unbabel solution. We really are thinking about Unbabel as a partner in a multitude of situations.”
“I absolutely would recommend Unbabel to any company that wants to work in a global market and needs to have customer support or even partner support in multiple languages, because it will allow them to be flexible and scalable without increasing the overhead costs, mainly payroll costs and the associated costs of adding more people. We can use Unbabel to really scale operations.”
— Rogério Correia, Head of ROI & Optimization, FARFETCH
Looking to expand across markets or optimize your multilingual operations with on-brand quality? Unbabel can help.
