Pair Eyewear sees continued growth with Zendesk’s CX platform

Pair Eyewear is all about embracing change, especially when it comes to helping people find glasses to fit their daily mood, schedule, or personal style. The company creates innovative, high-quality eyewear featuring base frames with magnetic top frames that can be swapped out, allowing customers to build a personalized collection. Since 2017, Pair has brought customers the familiarity and reliability of a subscription model with the flexibility to change things up at any time.

That commitment to a customer’s evolving needs carries over to Pair’s customer service, too. As Senior Director of CX Experience, Ben Segal leads a group of agents who support the pre- and post-sales experience across chat, email, voice, web, and social media channels. His philosophy at Pair is to translate a high touch, white glove experience to the contact center space. Providing personalized, empathetic service is no small feat for a team that handles around 1,000 orders each day.

Future-proofing the business with a scalable solution

Pair started out exclusively selling eyewear for kids, before launching an adult line with 13 new base frames. While Gorgias was a suitable system for Pair as a small startup with simple workflows to handle common ecommerce support requests, the growing company needed a more complete solution with automation and integrations to support increasing volume and complexity at scale.

Segal came on board with more than a decade of real world experience in customer service and familiarity with various platforms, including Freshdesk, Gladly, Kustomer, and Dixa. “We explored other CX solutions, but none of them had the in-depth reporting and insights, automated features, and community support that Zendesk offers,” says Segal. Executive leaders at Pair also supported the transition.

Zendesk Suite opened a world of opportunities for Segal and his colleagues, as the CX team grew from 14 to 150+ employees during his first year on the job. Having a sophisticated, omnichannel routing system has given agents more visibility into each ticket so they can understand the full context and respond quickly.

“Zendesk has a deep understanding of the user experience in solving tickets, as well as setting the industry standard for the agent experience over the last ten years,” adds Segal. The platform has been a great fit for the company. Since implementing Zendesk, Pair has seen 25 percent business growth month over month. Segal is confident that the improvements in technology and community support provided by Zendesk will go a long way to future-proof operations at Pair.

“Meeting customers where they are” with automations

In an effort to maximize workflows, Segal abides by a simple principle: “Automate but don’t push the customer away.” Early on he made a list of Zendesk integrations that he wanted to deploy, starting with the Ada AI agent, which has helped deflect 76 percent of the chat volume.

“Delivering a great service experience is about meeting customers where they are, instead of making them work to get support,” adds Segal. Knowing that Pair lacked a tagging architecture, he also integrated Lang.ai so his team could categorize tickets faster and route them to specific agents with special views enabled in Zendesk.

Improving talk support was also crucial. After merging RedRoute voice assistance with Zendesk, Pair has been able to deflect 20 percent of inbound phone calls. When a customer opts to stay on the line, an agent typically responds in less than 15 seconds.

Great customer experiences start with best-of-breed solutions

In Zendesk Suite, Pair found all the core capabilities it needed for scaled customer service out of the box. As the business grew, and the volume and complexity of requests increased, the company found incremental value from the app marketplace of best-of-breed solutions. The optimizations to their technology stack ultimately led to higher agent efficiency, stronger customer feedback and analytics, and better agent training. “All of our integrations work well with Zendesk,” says Segal. “Our average chat time is now less than 50 seconds.”

The Shopify integration allows agents to view order history and provide faster support, while Loris.ai for chat and email guides agent conversations in real time within the Zendesk ticketing system. As a result, Pair has reduced its first reply time by 83 percent.

Integrating Lessonly training software has also helped agents increase productivity and elevate customer service at Pair. “Our goal is always to provide the best in class experience to the end user and continue to do that at scale.”

Quality assurance data was nonexistent before Pair linked Pathlight and the Stella Connect app to Zendesk. Now agents have access to customer feedback, coaching, and valuable metrics based on individual performance. “Zendesk reporting makes it easy to view daily metrics and see where we can improve efficiencies,” says Segal. Today the team reports an average QA score of 85 percent and a 21 percent increase in NPS.

With all these best-of-breed analytics tools at his fingertips, Segal has more visibility into service levels so he can improve agent engagement and customer satisfaction. Pair is consistently earning a 96 percent CSAT score.

Data-driven insights to create lifelong customers

Data from Zendesk provides valuable customer insights, which the team can learn from and use to optimize processes while future-proofing the business. For example, Segal has been studying the data on customers who interacted with Pair support, had good reply times, rated their first experience highly, and left a comment. Return customers from that group showed an increase of $250K lifetime value (LTV) over one year.

“Everything hinges on the initial order, which typically requires more complex support from our team. If the first interaction is positive and seamless, the customer will come back,” explains Segal. He knows that creating positive connections and delivering great customer service are crucial to establishing repeat business.

Using tags and Shopify data in Looker, the team has also been able to identify the time of death in each customer journey and effectively recover two percent of revenue.

Expansion to international markets now possible

Pair Eyewear is invested in ongoing education and building out a knowledge base, so Zendesk’s online forum has become the go-to resource for agents to learn about best practices and customer engagement, beyond just driving sales. Segal says, “The Zendesk community gives us a place to find expert support and exchange ideas as they organically happen.”

Using Zendesk has also given Pair the confidence and CX capabilities to venture into international markets that they wouldn’t otherwise be in a position to explore. “Creating multi-brand, multi-language support is now possible with Zendesk.”