In any company, cost cutting means degraded user experience. It goes like clockwork. The cost to sustain a feature/system goes down, and so does the user experience.
While Meesho follows a cost over convenience policy, it also lays significant emphasis on user experience.
There is no trade-off.
This story is about how we walked the tightrope between controlling costs and maintaining user satisfaction while revamping our in-app help centre.
But first, the backstory:
The pebbles in our shoes
Customer support is a critical component in any company prepping for the long marathon. Especially for a company like ours, where most of our users are from tier-III, tier-IV cities, and are first time e-commerce users. Customer support thus is important to alleviate user anxiety.
We prioritise solving user queries and consequently improving user experience. This in turn increases our customer retention and thus reorders. And the wheels go round and round smoothly.
But admittedly, we had a few pebbles in our shoes that demanded our immediate attention.
Two of the biggest being:
- Customer anxiety because of no upfront order updates Lack of upfront order updates made users, most of whom are new digital shoppers, anxious about their order status. These users are prone to abandoning their query resolution journey because of complexities and lack of digital experience, and might never return to shop online again.
- Long wait-time for users to connect with customer executives to solve minor queriesUsers who continued their query resolution journey faced a long wait-time to connect with our executives. The users were required to dial our IVR number, select options based on their query, and wait for our agent to come on call.This wait-time meant an increasing number of call drop-offs and highly anxious customers. And to make it worse - higher cost per order (CPO). Additionally, the higher wait time required us to hire more customer support agents to resolve queries in time; further adding to the cost.
Amends were needed. Pronto!
Greasing our squeakiest wheel
Now, with the problem identified, it was time to populate the drawing board. We knew the challenges we needed to solve:
- Address customer anxiety
- Reduce call-wait time
- Reduce the volume of calls going to our agents
- Solve queries independently without manual support
- Reduce the cost per order
Tacitly, our solutions must also educate and train our users about common e-commerce functionalities so they become confident in dealing with e-commerce platforms.
Here’s a fact: over the past few months, you tried calling someone but disconnected only to skip the Covid PSA, then dialled again immediately.
Here’s another fact: you don’t let that YouTube ad play a microsecond after the ‘skip’ option comes on.
Your intent to skip both ads is pretty high.
Similarly, query resolution is also a high intent activity. Here, the user is looking for the simplest, easiest, and most familiar way to get information.
With these insights and understandings, we went about building our new help-centre.
Building the blocks
With the solution identified, we went about building the In-app Help Centre.
The ‘Help Center’ is a two-part support platform where one half deals with automatic order detection and status information while the other tackles more nuanced queries from the user.
Once the user opens the Help Center on the app; they can get instant information about their orders by clicking or choosing queries from a list of FAQs. These FAQs are vetted and arranged in the descending order of importance and frequency.
At the backend, Help Center relays the relevant user details to our executives. The executive is intimated about the calling user’s ID, order updates, et cetera to improve query resolution time.
And finally, a user could opt for a “call me back” option where our customer is assured that they will receive a call from our agents in 5 minutes, thus reducing anxiety.
It worked!
Since its deployment; the Help Center has shown a 36% reduction in average call handling time and reduction in Cost Per Order (CPO) by 15%. Moreover, we saw a jump of 6 points in our NPS (Net Promoter Score) - a metric to track user satisfaction.
We were able to shift our user’s dependency on customer care agents for resolution to a self-serve platform where users were able to get quick resolutions themselves.
A huge shout-out to Mahi Khakhar and the team for leading this project from start to end. Special thanks to Mahi for helping me write this blog.
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