At a glance
- Founded: 2014, Hamburg, Germany
- Serves over 12 million customers
- Offers support in 26 European markets and 25 languages
The challenge
AboutYou, a leading digital fashion and lifestyle retailer, offers a wide range of apparel, accessories, and footwear to customers across multiple markets. Renowned for its innovative approach to personalization, About You creates a highly tailored shopping experience, setting a benchmark for e-commerce excellence. However, offering personalized, on-time and on-brand support across European markets, while delivering on growth targets, is no small task.
Managing volume spikes is a critical challenge for any retailer, and also a key opportunity to grow revenue. Whether spikes come from marketing campaigns, supplier challenges, or the behemoth of Black Friday, AboutYou needed a way to scale customer service resources without constantly hiring or incurring large costs, while maintaining a consistent, quality support experience.
“We consistently faced the costly challenge of ramping up and down short-term resources for our campaigns. This is where Unbabel came into play, helping us to flexibly allocate our existing resources across markets that are the focus of these campaigns. Unbabel provided quick, straightforward processes from implementation to agent training and tool utilization, making it an efficient solution for our needs.”
– René Fischer, Senior Customer Service Controller & Product Admin
The solution
AboutYou selected Unbabel’s AI-powered translation platform, combining machine and human translation to meet a variety of quality needs, to address this customer service growth challenge. Unbabel was chosen for its ability to provide:
- Kwaliteit: Unbabel’s high-quality translations ensures AboutYou maintains its commitment to providing excellent support – even during peak periods.
- Simplicity: Unbabel’s onboarding process and integration into existing systems like Zendesk are seamless, simplifying the implementation and agent training process for AboutYou.
- Partner Approach: Unbabel’s mix of dedicated support, deep linguistic expertise and developing tailored solutions to meet AboutYou’s specific needs showed the level of investment into the relationship.
The results
By integrating Unbabel into Zendesk and progressively rolling out the solution across languages, AboutYou achieved significant improvements in its customer service operations:
- Cost Savings: Black Friday in particular is a challenge in retail and ecommerce, and AboutYou was able to accrue savings in the six-figure range during Black Friday by avoiding the need to hire and train additional customer service representatives.
- Consistent Performance: There was no negative impact with Unbabel on KPIs like Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, handling times, or the overall customer experience.
- Strengthened Partner Relations: AboutYou received positive feedback from its outsourcing partners. The new flexibility let these partners reduce frequent staffing adjustments, improving stability and employee retention.
“Despite initial doubts, the tool has proven to be extremely user-friendly. The biggest advantage is that ticket handling is hardly any different from the way I’m used to handling tickets in my native language. The handling is intuitive and smooth, so that the workflow remains uninterrupted, and the tool is quick and easy to use. Unbabel makes a significant contribution to overcoming language barriers without complicating the work process.”
– AboutYou Customer Support Agent
Managing Spikes in Action: Black Friday
Black Friday clearly demonstrates the flexibility AboutYou enjoys with Unbabel. With massive customer service spikes, AboutYou was able to much more smoothly manage the volume without increasing headcount.
With Unbabel, AboutYou strategically deploys resources to address the early peaks in Romania and Bulgaria, where Black Friday starts earlier. By deploying Unbabel-supported agents to these spikes, AboutYou didn’t have to recruit and train on short notice. As volume in Romania and Bulgaria subsided, but surged in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, AboutYou re-allocated these resources seamlessly, again without the churn of hiring and training.
This flexibility allows AboutYou to successfully manage the Black Friday surge without having to hire additional staff. By shuffling the team based on capacity, rather than language skill, they could avoid an increase in FTEs in the mid double digits, and the associated cost of mid five-figures per FTE. This corresponding savings lets AboutYou invests where it matters – in the customer experience.
Unbabel’s AI-powered translation platform lets AboutYou efficiently manage customer service operations, particularly during periods of high demand. By making their agents multilingual, AboutYou can flexibly use resources to meet spikes wherever they are, and support the businesses revenue and marketing goals, no matter the market, while still meeting the high standards of support and customer experience AboutYou has set.
Looking to expand across markets or optimize your multilingual operations with on-brand quality? Unbabel can help.
