La Fourche is an online organic grocery shop dedicated to delivering organic products at a lower price. Their objective: to make organic food accessible and to give the power back to the users. A year and a half ago, Loïc Cholloux joined la Fourche and managed to grow the customer care department from the bottom. He likes to compare the process that their CS team has gone through to growing a tree, from the seed to its connection with the forest that is La Fourche as a company.

The Seed

When Loïc arrived, customer care was a two people team whose main goal was to answer tickets. Coming from an engineering background, had great plans. He set out to grow this seed step-by-step. And to make sure that each of his team members was on board, his very first action was to set up OKRs that would enforce his plan.

Building strong roots

According to Loïc, the roots of his customer care philosophy lied in making sure that the core needs of customers were met: answering tickets in the best possible way. 

His first project was optimizing their FTR (First Time Response) and Full Resolution Time to provide his customers with reactive answers.. Soon came other projects such as: 

• Processes optimization

• Increasing quality and customers NPS, 

• Setting up processes for continuous improvement

• Implementing a Hybrid Chatbot.

All of these, in an effort to go from solving tickets to creating human conversations. 

Building a resilient trunk

Once the foundations were built, Loïc started to work on building a strong trunk: a resilient core to be able to scale and grow as cleanly and efficiently as possible. 

This meant, first of all, making sure that the team was self-sufficient. 

To do this, he worked on making sure that the level of information was consistent within the team through building both a smart knowledge base and a resilient team structure based on ownership to maximize the retaining of their CS agents.

Next, came the optimization of the Operations Quality. Loïc’s three main challenges, here, were: 

• Optimizing the comprehension and organization of the delivery processes; 

• Lowering the amount of Level 1 tickets: by building a strong and smart FAQ to avoid unnecessary conversations;

• Ensuring that the tickets handled by internal agents are mainly Level 2 or 3 by outsourcing Level 1 tickets to onepilot. 

Building a new KPI

The last part of Loïc’s vision in creating a strong, resilient, core, was the creation of a new KPI: Conversation To Order. 

With this KPI, Loïc’s goal truly came to life by offering his agents the chance to do much more than simply answer tickets; they were now productive members of the team with a new Sales role. This new KPI encouraged agents to see conversations as growth drivers but also showed the entire la Fourche team that customer care was much more than what they expected it to be. 

Growing tasty fruits 

From there on, Loïc’s vision did not stop; as the CS team’s responsibilities grew, and as their processes were optimized more and more every day, many ideas came to them. 

And from Customer Support, was born Customer Care. 

This year’s achievement, for Loïc, definitely is the creation of an Active Churn Taskforce, aimed first at understanding the root causes of churn, and then at addressing these through reactive strategies: one of them being creating a calling taskforce, and another being creating optimized unsubscription offers for churning customers. 

The next step, currently in progress, is to also address what Loïc calls Delinquent Churn: understanding its causes, and once again finding solutions through a strategic payment mix, improvement of the products, as well as reactive strategies. 

Finally, the next step in transforming Customer Support into Customer Care is building loyalty to avoid future churns. For this, Loïc found that there was a strong correlation between the customer’s activity during the first months and the future churn. As a result, his team will work on creating a better onboarding process for their customers, in the optics of creating more frequent orders. Finally, they will craft themselves a loyalty and rewards program. 

Connecting with the forest

The last step in Loic’s great vision is bringing his customer care team to be a part of the forest: replacing customer care department at the heart of La Fourche team. 

How did he do that? By establishing the Lovely Day, a day during which each member of the team joins the customer care team and answers tickets or by creating the Newsletter of Love, in which the CC team shares their customer’s best verbatims with the rest of the team.