At a glance
- Founded: november 2008, Chicago, IL
- Serves 18 million customers across 13 markets & languages and roughly 10 million customer & merchant contacts per year
- US is their largest market, followed by UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy & Australia
- CRM system: Zendesk for customer service and Salesforce for merchant operations
- ~500,000 customer support tickets & 50,000 merchant operations support tickets monthly
The challenge
Global goods and getaways e-commerce marketplace, Groupon, connects more than 18M customers to local merchants daily. With more than 1 billion activities, events, and goods & services sold across 13 countries to date, they sought out earlier this year to centralize their CS operations to better support and provide a more positive CX to their customers and merchants alike.
Historically, Groupon had multiple BPO vendor arrangements across the globe, including 6 shared service centers across Bangalore and Chennai, India, Warsaw, Poland, and Valencia, Spain, plus agreements in place over the years with multiple different providers from the Philippines to South Africa.
“Although they are a huge workforce, you can’t really find many Dutch speakers in India, so it wasn’t possible for us to centralize support there without having a truly scalable solution for CS translations.”
– Adam Lindsey, Director of Global Support Organization
The solution
“We had extensive discussions with multiple translation providers – including Unbabel – comparing functionality, costs, language support, and integrations with all the different tools we use. And after thorough comparison, we ultimately chose Unbabel, because they really met our needs from a technical integration, functionality, and cost perspective.”
In early 2023, Unbabel facilitated in consolidating country-specific support teams into one global, language-agnostic team, and enabled the massive transformation of 400+ positions over to India-shared services operations. This included helping to navigate the complexities of B2B merchant workflows – a much greater challenge than typical customer service inquiries, which involves the handling of contracts and legal agreements.
The Unbabel effect
- Implemented 24/7 global support coverage, including smaller markets like Belgium, Ireland and Poland, where it typically wouldn’t have been viable
- Significant cost savings from having to rely on multiple vendors across the world to consolidating to one global location
- Increase in productivity from ~9 to ~12 sessions per agent per hour
- Utilized Unbabel to respond to reactive Social Media requests
- Positive agent feedback on seamless integration with CRM tools
“The success criteria for Unbabel was for us to remain neutral – meaning the best possible outcome is everything stays the same. And thankfully, we have achieved that. We were already quite happy with our CSAT and service levels, so the fact that we were able to make this transition with no impact to customers is what we define as success. If you look at it from a purely numbers perspective, you wouldn’t know that the transition has happened……It’s been three months down the line, and Unbabel has been very successful for us – we now handle 100% of our customer service efforts from both customers and merchants out of India; 70% English and 30% non-English.”
After achieving desired results within such a short amount of time, Groupon expanded Unbabel’s capabilities to wider use cases within their organization, apart from the customer service and merchant operations. As they no longer have a dedicated, in-house translation team in place, staff across Groupon had been relying on other team members to assist with language translation, a process in which they described as “incredibly inefficient and resource-heavy.”
“We needed a solution that would be truly sufficient for our business needs and keep us protected from privacy and confidentiality issues. That’s why we’ve relied on the web version of Unbabel for teams and processes that are outside of customer service emergence operations to translate training and both merchant and customer-facing FAQs.”
Looking to expand across markets or optimize your multilingual operations with on-brand quality? Unbabel can help.
