“When our customers speak to us, we want to listen. We’re using Zendesk Support to become a much more customer-centric company, and doing that on a local level, not just through our head office.”
- James Kerridge
Online Operations Manager - Harris Farm Markets
11 Million
Customers/Year
7
Number of Full Time Agents
1,000
Employees
4
Customer Service Channels
Harris Farm Markets is one of Australia’s fastest growing independent grocery store chains. With 23 stores, 11 million customers each year, and a booming online retail business, the company is looking toward the future. At the heart of its growth, Harris Farm Markets wants to earn the love of its customers.
Harris Farm Markets is a family owned and operated business which began in 1971 when David and Cathy Harris opened up their first shop in Villawood, New South Wales. To this day the Harris Family, including David and Cathy Harris, remains hands-on in the business.
For more than 40 years Harris Farm Markets has been delivering fresh produce to Australian families with the core value and belief that Australian families should have the freshest and best available to them. Harris Farm Markets is home to over 1,000 employees who work to deliver good produce to the 11 million customers who walk through its doors every year.
Being run by an Australian family means that Harris Farm Markets always works toward its customers being able to feed their families with great tasting and fresh food. Harris Farm Markets believes that this commitment to good eating and fairness is why customers continue to shop with them to this day.
“When our customers speak to us, we want to listen. We’re using Zendesk Support to become a much more customer-centric company, and doing that on a local level, not just through our Head Office,” said James Kerridge, online operations manager at Harris Farm Markets.
“When we reviewed our long-term strategy, we decided we wanted to really earn the love of our customers, so customer experience and customer service has now become the driving factor in our business,” said Kerridge. “In order to earn that love, we had to learn exactly what interactions lead to happy customers.”
Kerridge explains that Harris Farm Markets had a number of customer service channels which were all going to different places. In addition to its many stores across New South Wales, the company has a contact centre based in its head office which takes customer calls and emails, social media contacts, and Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) surveys sent automatically to customers with their invoices through Harris Farm Markets’ eCommerce platform.
“We had data from a lot of different places that we weren’t able to combine to find out where our strengths and weaknesses lay,” said Kerridge.
Harris Farm Markets has been using Zendesk Support for around six months and is using the customer data provided by Support’s analytics to discover how it can make the company more customer-centric.
“Zendesk Support makes it so easy to integrate voice and all our customer channels into a singular platform and the customer support and ticketing system allows for universal customer interactions no matter where they originated,” said Kerridge.
Support has given Harris Farm Markets’ customer service team more measurable key performance indicators (KPIs)—from call time to productivity measures, to level of customer satisfaction. As Kerridge explains, “This gives us more clarity in management.”
“Most importantly, Zendesk Support let us finally look at and analyze the data and feedback from our customers—what makes our customers happy and also what we needed to work on,” said Kerridge.
“Insight into which customer interactions are good and which we need to work on gives us a more organized process that helps us define our path for the business as a whole,” said Kerridge.
James Kerridge said that working with their account manager at Zendesk has helped them to do that. “I can’t imagine any other company would be able to offer that level of experience and advice in the retail and eCommerce sector; we’re able to sit down with Zendesk and work out what we want and how to get it.”
“What we’re starting to see is data at a more qualitative level, all in one place,” said Kerridge.
“We’re now using the data from Zendesk to make more macro-level decisions on customer experience. It’s not just fixing customer enquiries as they come in; we can look at the bigger picture and wider challenges we need to tackle as a business.”
Net Promoter and NPS are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.