How Atlas Bars cut maintenance costs and increased agent efficiency by choosing Richpanel over Zendesk and Gorgias

Challenge

Atlas bars had been using Gorgias and then, Zendesk. Since Zendesk hadn't been created for e-commerce merchants, Atlas bars had to heavily customise it. Over time, bugs from further customisations became hard to manage. The end result: needless operational overhead both in terms of time spent and  development expenses. Ultimately, James Oliver, Atlas bars’ founder, concluded Zendesk was made for B2B businesses, not D2C e-commerce merchants. This prompted him to look for alternatives.

Repetitive order related queries had also become hard to manage as Atlas bars scaled with a small team.

Atlas bars chose Richpanel, a solution built for e-commerce.

Integrate to differentiate

Atlas bars had been using Recharge SMS, a subscription management tool powered by transactional SMSes. They used it to power their differentiated subscription offering - Atlas club, which gave subscribers VIP concierge SMS support. Since customers expect instant responses on SMS, it was crucial agents saw Recharge SMSes as they came.  Richpanel’s Recharge integration let agents do exactly that. Contrastingly, Zendesk didn’t have a Recharge Integration.

Smart ticket assignment

Atlas bars had outsourced SMS support to Wrrk. Executing this arrangement with Wrrk was made easy using Richpanel’s automation rules feature. By using it they programatically assign all SMS conversations to Wrrk agents. Similarly, all social media interactions like Facebook and Instagram comments are programatically assigned to Atlas bars employees instead.

Personalized self-service for a world-class CX

Atlas bars have also automated repetitive tickets related to orders and FAQs. Using self-service’s custom forms feature, Atlas Bars automatically collect images of damaged or wrongly delivered products. Similarly, they have automated collection of new delivery addresses. For incomplete orders, customers can conveniently choose missing products from an ordered items list.  Order tracking requests, FAQs and Subscription related queries are now handled without any human involvement. These automations have standardised responses to repetitive scenarios making their CX consistent. Additionally, the automations now do a lot of Atlas Bar’s customer support heavy-lifting freeing them to focus on more unique pre-purchase questions.

Strategic Benefits

No customizations. No overhead.

Since Richpanel’s features and integrations are purpose built for e-commerce, Atlas bars did not need to customize it. This meant no additional time or capital was spent on developing and maintaining customizations.

Atlas bars has a finger on the consumer pulse, always

Since CSAT surveys are triggered only when there’s an agent response and when a conversation has at least 50 characters, Atlas bars can use those reports as a reliable barometer of customer satisfaction and even agent performance. More importantly, seeing Facebook and Instagram comments from their Richpanel inbox allows them to control their brand narrative without using different applications.

Richpanel’s reporting was a lot more robust than Gorgias’. I frequently look at the CSAT report and love the filter on it. Seeing CSAT scores by agent helps me track their performance. Plus, Seeing Facebook and Instagram comments was super helpful. I look at those every day and it's helpful to not have to go outside of the platform and instead, see them just like they were a customer message

Outsourcing customer support made easy

Atlas Bars has had no problem training new Wrrk agents on Richpanel thanks to its intuitiveness and usability. More importantly, they are not worried about adding new seats for new Wrrk agents since all Richpanel plans grant them unlimited seats.