Freshdesk helps Decathlon achieve 82% customer satisfaction rating

About Decathlon

Decathlon, headquartered in France, is the world’s largest sports goods retailer. Decathlon opened its first store in India in 2009 to achieve their objective of making sport accessible to many. Today, more than 84 Decathlon stores in India offeri sports products for beginners, intermediate and semi-professional sports enthusiasts.

Goal (Challenge)

Prior to implementing Freshdesk, Decathlon India’s user experience team was dependent on their email system to manage their customer and user requests/tickets. Decathlon is driven by the ideology of being a user-centric company. However, high reliance on the email system posed challenges in delivering customer happiness and maintaining good customer relations. Besides facing the risk of customer dissatisfaction, the lack of an integrated CRM software posed the following key challenges for the company:

 

• Difficulty in monitoring and following up on a request, whether closed, open, or pending.
• There was no tool to adequately measure agent productivity. Therefore Decathlon had to withhold its plan to link performance-based incentives. These incentives or bonuses were to be distributed to their staff based on user feedback and team performance.
• An inefficient system to measure customer feedback.
• Agents’ performance evaluation without an organized reporting mechanism.
• Analyze and understand customer (sports enthusiast) behavior.

With the company expanding and increasing its store presence in India, it was crucial for Decathlon to focus on customer satisfaction. This they did by incorporating a structured customer response system.

Vijoy Nair, Head of User Happiness at Decathlon, India chose Freshdesk as their ticket management and CRM system for:

• Its shared ideology with Freshworks as being a customer centric organization.
• Delivering a cost-effective yet highly customizable solution to improve customer happiness.
• Integrating multiple ticketing channels such as emails, calls, website chat and social media.

The solution we provided

• Knowledge base to help customers effortlessly find answers to common issues at their convenience.  Enhanced during the pandemic, the knowledge base found excellent uptake by customers, resulting in 195 articles published with over 780,000 views. 
• Among the various alternatives evaluated by Decathlon India, Freshdesk proved to be a cost effective solution, that was not just user friendly but adaptive and customizable to the requirements of Decathlon as well.
• Freshdesk was integrated with Decathlon’s internal CRM system thereby seamlessly using out-of-the-box capabilities such as chat, email, phone, and social media (primarily Facebook) channels.
• With Freshdesk’s software, Decathlon is now able to measure and improve its user happiness quotient. Freshdesk has made it possible for Decathlon to reply to every query and resolve every complaint with continuous follow up combined with the least possibility of missing any event.
• Freshdesk’s reporting features have given the agents a chance to monitor their daily or weekly performance. Decathlon management now has access to performance measurement data and identifies performance-based incentives based on user happiness delivered by an agent.
• With the Notes feature, agents are able to keep track of pending items and follow up with customers as quickly as possible.
• By integrating the chat feature, agents at Decathlon are now able to respond to customer queries very quickly. Following it up with customer satisfaction surveys has helped improve the performance of the team as well.
• By hosting its platform on AWS, Freshworks is able to focus its resources on developing an easy-to-use and intuitive product while leveraging a proven, reliable cloud infrastructure. With Freshdesk on AWS, customer support agents can instantly access customer data from anywhere.

Freshdesk and Decathlon are partnering to build a single view system which will integrate the online & offline experiences of a user. Decathlon aims to enhance the customer relationship management process by providing better insights into customer requirements, thereby enabling agents to address customer needs more efficiently and ultimately improving the user happiness quotient.
 

Successes

Decathlon has been using Freshdesk for over four years now and today they are a team of 45 customer support reps using Freshdesk. Freshdesk has thus contributed to the vision of Decathlon to make sports accessible to all.

Post implementation of Freshdesk, first call response time has reduced to just over an hour. This, combined with the personal touch that an integrated CRM and chat provide, has increased user satisfaction at Decathlon. Though average ticket volume has increased by 1700% in a span of four years, Decathlon’s User Happiness team has maintained resolution SLA at over 95%. 

Based on the mutual vision of user happiness which Freshdesk shares with Decathlon, Vijoy Nair highly recommends Freshdesk to companies who are looking for an easy-to-use, cost-effective, and integrated solution for ticket management and more effective customer relationship management.
 

METRICS	BEFORE FRESHDESK	AFTER FRESHDESK
Customer satisfaction	Not measured	82%
First Call Response Time	87 mins	61 mins
Resolution SLA	79%	95%
Average Monthly Ticket Volume	326	5647