Highlights
The surge in demand during a global pandemic for flexible remote and hybrid work solutions has skyrocketed Logitech’s growth in 2020. To support a 300% increase in ticket volume, the Logitech team had to think fast about meeting its global customers’ needs. Luckily, a long-term partnership with Unbabel meant they had already created a scalable multilingual infrastructure. Logitech was able to quickly increase staffing by 45 percent, while keeping spending flat, and strategically increase the existing team’s efficiency in order to absorb the extra demand. As a result, they kept spending flat despite a 300% increase in call volume, raised NPS scores by 58 points, and cut ticket response times to 12 hours vs. 48 hours with native speakers.
About Logitech
Founded in 1981 in Lausanne, Switzerland, Logitech offers a number of innovative products that connect people through music, gaming, video and computing. Under a number of different brands, the company offers PC peripherals; including many industry firsts such as the infrared cordless mouse, the thumb-operated trackball, the laser mouse, and more.
At a glance
- $1.26 billion in revenue
- Year-over-year revenue growth of 75% reported in FY Q2 2020
- Products distributed in over 100 countries
The challenge
Complex, technical service requests
Logitech customers are often hobbyists or professionals inquiring into highly customized equipment. They might approach the support team with questions about bespoke lighting or custom mouse settings down to a thousandth of a DPI, for instance. With remote and hybrid work on the rise in 2020, the volume of technical inquiries only increased.
In the past, Logitech’s team of generalist support agents would field these requests across 24 languages. Often these agents lacked the expertise and technical knowledge to fulfill complex customer inquiries, which would escalate these incidents to regional account managers. In addition, multilingual support requests were once handled with generic translation tools, which were unable to accurately translate technical jargon. Agents copied and pasted responses between these tools and their ticketing platform, which created a high margin for error and negatively impacted CSAT scores.
Switching to Unbabel in 2019 helped alleviate these concerns. Agents now work directly within Zendesk to seamlessly translate multilingual support requests using Unbabel’s human-machine translation platform. This approach had previously improved CSAT scores by 20%. But that was just the beginning.
Handling a global surge in demand – remotely
In 2020, when global shutdowns forced an abrupt transition to remote work, Logitech’s support team saw an unprecedented 300% surge in customer requests around its home office solutions. At the same time, its own global customer experience (CX) team had to transition to remote work in less than two weeks, posing bandwidth and security challenges with VPNs, telephone, and CRM systems.
“We had internal challenges to work out, plus the sudden demand meant we had to staff up fast, but we focused on finding a solution that would represent a smarter approach. Our goal was to improve productivity with the same amount of technical representatives, and a huge win for us was to remove the language complexity on languages that drove low volume. After making the decision of offering only email support for those small queues, we improved the specialized training for SMEs. This helped to accelerate first contact resolution (FCR).”
– Adriana Vazquez, Head of CX, Core Operations, Logitech
With a growing backlog across all channels, the CX team had to think fast on how to securely shift their global team to remote work – without compromising on quality. That meant temporarily shutting down phone lines and turning to email – with fast, accurate translations from Unbabel – to work through the backlog.
The solution
Combining specialist agents with artificial intelligence
To address the issue of technical expertise among their generalist agents, the Logitech team made a major change to their CX team structure. Now, they employ specialized engineering talent across their 13 vertical product areas, so agents are equipped with the knowledge to respond to customer requests quickly. This approach decreased escalations dramatically. In the past, Logitech had to hire native language generalists across 24 languages. Now they can focus on technical talent and rely on Unbabel to take care of the translation layer.
“Previously it would take 12 to 13 weeks to hire native speakers. Now we can recruit English-speaking technical engineering talent in India who have the knowledge needed to address our customers’ concerns. That reduces our hiring time to only one week and saves on the cost of recruiting and training generalist agents for lower volume languages. Now we can focus on our customers first, instead of the language barrier.”
– Adriana Vazquez, Head of CX, Core Operations, Logitech
This approach helped the Logitech team quickly scale to meet the 300% surge in demand. The CX team was able to keep costs flat while increasing staffing by 45%. In less than three months, with Zendesk and Unbabel enabling a smooth remote transition, Logitech’s existing and new-hire English-speaking specialists had stamped out the backlog by successfully responding to complex issues across 24 languages.
Rising to the challenge of sky-high expectations
“We’re proud of how fast we were able to move as a global organization in response to the pandemic, in part because we already had the technology infrastructure and tools to work remotely,” said Vazquez Del Mercado. “But we have even more ambitious plans for customer care.”
Looking forward, Logitech’s CX team has a continued challenge on their hands. A quick transition to eCommerce sales has raised the bar for customer expectations. Even for organizations like Logitech that adapted quickly to scaling demand that outstripped supply, customers expect Amazon-like infrastructure and speed. As a result, Logitech is relying more heavily on Unbabel in the coming months to translate customer requests across even more channels, so the CX team can meet customers where they are today.
The Unbabel effect
- Logitech went from 12-13 weeks to hire native speakers to one week to hire an expert with technical skills.
- The CX team increased staffing by 45% while keeping spending flat.
- Their existing team took on the 300% increase in volume. The old model would have required a 300% increase in staffing.
- With Unbabel, ticket response time reduced to 12 hours vs. 48 hours with a native speaker.
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