Take the Doctor home with Dr Brandt Skincare!

Dr Brandt was founded in 1995 by Dr. Fredric Brandt, a renowned pioneering American Dermatologist and is historically one of the first skincare lines in the US.

The brand creates and distributes science-based skincare products that deliver real and long lasting results. All products are clinically tested and the formulas are compliant worldwide, avoiding more than 1,500 ingredients.

With 30 products distributed in 24 markets, Dr Brandt is a leader in Clinical skincare today.

Why run BFCM when you are an E-merchant?

Black Friday is one of the biggest, if not the biggest shopping day of the year! On this day, the rush is on to make sure that E-merchants have plenty of inventory, plenty of good competitive deals, plenty of part-time employees. It’s a nerve racking time with sales made round the clock. 

New customer acquisition can be expensive, but BCFM offers E-merchants a chance to acquire new customers at a key time of year with higher AOV than usual. Indeed, people tend to spend more, buy new products and even try new routines because prices are more affordable.

“For us it is a great way to gain new clients, the ones who might only visit our website and did not convert after all. It allows us to test new things. We can increase the LTV and test new types of campaigns like affiliation with influencers or campaigns and retarget customers by mail when they don’t purchase their baskets and exist in a competitive environment”, explains Alexandre COO at Dr Brandt.

During Black Friday, Dr Brandt makes 15% of its global sales and triple its conversion rate!  But if the BFCM can boost the year to date net profit for many E-merchants, it can also turn into a nightmare if they do not have efficient customer care and have a real impact on the brand's reputation.

What are the main challenges faced by Dr Brandt’s customer care during BCFM?

With a backlog of tickets and slower shipping times than normal during this strategic period for E-merchants & retailers, there is a real risk of losing revenue, losing customers, and getting negative reviews. Why?  

• Because the volume of Dr Brandt’s tickets increase x2: pre, during, post BFCM across all channels

• Client expectations increase X2 in terms of responsiveness, expertise and coverage from the brands. The promotion period is short and they are in a rush because no one buys their Christmas presents on time…

• They have 5 to 10X orders to handle

With 66% of customers switching to a competitor after a bad experience with a brand, it is essential to have efficient customer care.

But if you train your team properly you can improve the service of the company and it’s not because you have 10x more orders than you will have 10x tickets!

How to provide top-notch customer service during BFCM? 

“The customer must be at the centre of everything. You can have a great website, nice products but if you don’t have good customer support they will not buy from you again!”, says Alexandre.

This is particularly true when 87% of customers will make another purchase from the company due to great customer care experience! Brands need to make sure their customer care agents are their best brand ambassadors to engage, convert and satisfy their customers.

Make your agents your best brand ambassadors

“During BFCM, the staff is key! In the US, there are a lot of bank holidays during the peak and we must be organised to have people working to answer our clients and send the packages. Customers are expecting super fast answers from us!”.

To face this challenge, Dr Brandt already tried a few years ago to implement a self-service strategy by using bots, but their customers were not satisfied enough because people crave for human relationships. They decided to bring back human intervention, however with an understaffed customer care, it was not possible to manage all the requests during this seasonal peak.

By outsourcing its customer care to Onepilot during the BFCM period, they have been able to handle their extra volume of tickets in no time and with a high quality of service.

“With Onepilot, we are able to train Onepilot agents thanks to our tailor-made knowledge base we built with our dedicated Operation Manager. It is accessible whenever we need on the Onepilot platform and we can easily modify the answers or processes if we want to. The agents can be very autonomous to answer our clients, they know where to find the proper answer for each use case we have defined and use the proper tone of voice of the brand, as if they were fully part of our internal team”.

Alexandre can also check the quality of responses of the agents and make quick adjustments if needed thanks to Onepilot proprietary quality grid and get granular analytics such as the volume of tickets handled by the agents, the most common questions on any kind of topic, or even the average response time.

Getting the right technology to optimise agent productivity

Even though the focus is to really empower your team with a better conversation at the beginning, it's still really hard to paint that full picture of the customer: How many times they've called in? What have their recent interactions been like? What purchases did they make in the past? What information you've already collected on them?

“There’s a real opportunity for brands to rise above competitors if they can piece together the entire customer journey and have it in front of the support agents. If a brand can personalise that experience even a little bit, it’s a win!”.

Few years ago, Dr Brandt was using Zendesk as their ticketing tool but it required too much time and training for a small brand, “it was not plug and play, so we decided to use Gorgias which is fully integrated to Shopify and other of our tools such as Klaviyo or Recharge”. All their channels are synchronised into a single app to streamline the solution, keep track of their clients history and enhance Onepilot’s agents efficiency! 

They have automated simple tickets such as "where is my order" (WISMO) so they can speed up their response and resolution time by providing an immediate resolution to many common support tickets.

“For these simple questions, customers don’t need a “human touch” — they need fast, helpful responses”.

By automating these tickets, the agents can focus on more complex customer demands that will require human interaction.

Final words of Alexandre Venturino, Chief Operating Officer at Dr Brandt

Onepilot is a great solution for HR challenges because working in customer service can be very difficult, most of the time you have to manage complaints. Onepilot really took up the challenge by helping us to be more flexible, providing accurate answers and with an amazing time of response! They really know how to train agents and provide great advice in customer service.One of the greatest things is that our CX Manager now has more time to think about the strategy and give meaningful feedback to our product and marketing teams.

Don't wait until you are overwhelmed with inbound volume! Like Dr Brandt, trust Onepilot for outsourcing your customer support. Onepilot offers you a fast, flexible and easy-to-implement solution to quickly scale your teams. We guarantee 100% human and qualitative answers managed by our native agents. Contact us now for a demo here.