Article • 2 min read
Synchronized service: Citizen and Bulova merge with CX in mind
By Austin Aboav, Senior Product Marketing Associate, Zendesk
Last updated October 12, 2020
When two of the world’s most recognized fine watch brands, Citizen and Bulova, merged in 2018, they faced more than just the challenge of maintaining their distinctive identities, unique designs, and technologies. With one support organization having to serve customers for both brands, it became clear that streamlining the way the customer service team operated needed to be a priority—or else the customer experience would suffer. At issue? Agents needed to easily access all customer data across the brands in one place to continue to deliver the flawless customer experience Citizen and Bulova customers had come to expect.
Putting customers first
According to Jeffrey Cohen, president of Citizen Watch America, after the two brands migrated to a shared enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, getting an easy-to-use customer service solution in place was next in line—and the company chose Zendesk Support Enterprise. The company set up five instances: two each for Citizen and Bulova (retail and wholesale), as well as another for the Alpina brand.
“Zendesk gives us a dashboard so that we can see how people came to us—which touchpoint—whether that is by phone, e-mail, social media,” said Cohen in an interview with WatchPro. “It helps us get back to people and give them the right response in the best possible time. That is something that we measure and make sure that we are delivering excellence to retailers and consumers.”
While Zendesk was the ideal software solution, the Citizen and Bulova teams needed additional resources to customize the software, implement the system the way they envisioned, and train their internal teams. The company brought in Envoy, a Zendesk app developer and partner, and its experts became an extension of the team, leading it through the creation of a holistic solution. Envoy’s experts built a custom sidebar app using Zendesk Sunshine, a flexible CRM platform on AWS, that now allows Citizen and Bulova agents to easily retrieve all order information across brands from two Salesforce Commerce instances and have that customer data at their fingertips in one panel. The team also set up custom tickets for three product brands (and their agents) to create one place for the support team to track and solve requests in one voice.
Value Delivered
Citizen and Bulova now have the tools that aggregate customer data across brands and provide a complete picture of each customer to seamlessly track and resolve customer service requests in a unified way. Because agents no longer needed to have multiple windows open, they were able to reduce first reply time by 50%, increase CSAT by 14%, and now 80% of tickets are solved in a single touch. Not only do these new tools save agents time and create greater efficiencies, they also allow these luxury watch brands to provide a high-end customer experience that mirrors the companies’ commitment to quality and craftsmanship.
