Ratioparts CX helps drive profit with Zendesk and babelforce

Ratioparts is a leading distributor of spare parts for outdoor power equipment across Europe. In business for over 35 years, Ratioparts operates in 25 countries and has more than 100,000 different items in its stock list. The company’s goal is to make repairs affordable and practical for their customers.

Ratioparts’ orders and customer service requests peak during the summer months, placing a strain on the customer service team. With 500 to 800 highly specialized daily customer requests during the high season, Ratioparts needed to streamline its processes and find a way to accommodate seasonal demand peaks.

Breathing new life into customer service

Previously, Ratioparts customer service processes were fragmented, with some teams unable to see the full customer journey. Naturally, this led to an inconsistent and disjointed experience for customers at times. To make matters more challenging, the company’s old phone system lacked overflow between queues. Customers couldn’t always reach representatives during peak seasonal demand, and could even be disconnected without warning. These callers would sometimes circle back to the sales team to complain.

Ratioparts took the first step toward building a better customer journey by seeking out Zendesk. The team knew that adopting an omnichannel ticketing system would play a major part in understanding their callers better. However, that wasn’t the end of the story; they still had major issues with their phone system. According to the Customer Service Manager at Ratioparts, “We were lucky if it was working even one day without disturbances!”

The old system offered only a partial integration with Zendesk which meant tickets were only created after the call ended. This was a major time sink for the agents who had to manually fill in these tickets between calls instead of talking to customers.

Daily issues with call quality made it harder to provide reassuring customer service. On top of this, the frequent disconnections broke the smooth flow of conversations, leaving customers frustrated and issues unresolved. All these issues had the potential to erode trust, satisfaction, and brand reputation.

Features that their old telephony provider had promised were either absent or required even more investment. It was time to search for a better solution.

Zendesk automation is key

Ratioparts needed a reliable telephony provider that was built to work together with Zendesk, the company’s CX platform since 2022. Zendesk suggested babelforce, and the Ratioparts team was sold on the idea after learning that babelforce could auto-create Zendesk tickets before and during the call.

babelforce sprang into action, and completed the implementation for the Swedish branch of the Ratioparts CX department in just over two months. The team found the experience “superb” from start to finish, which gave them the confidence to roll babelforce out for its German customer service reps, as well.

From cost center to profit center

With the telephony issues sorted, it was time to use the new system to expand the CX department’s capabilities and make smarter use of quiet periods.

The Ratioparts customer service manager firmly believes in directing time and effort to the most impactful areas and also wanted the agents to be able to make better use of their time. With this in mind, steps were taken to understand which customers were most valuable to the business.

Ratioparts had realized that just one agent working outbound for half a day could generate up to €5,000 in revenue. The old system had been too restrictive for this kind of functionality. But with babelforce’s automated outbound dialer it was much easier to scale this activity. The customer service department is now on track for a daily revenue from outbound calls of more than €25,000.

The shift the customer service team was working on was significant: to adjust the inbound to outbound call ratio from 95-5 to 70-30. “Our dream is to change the customer service from a kind of a cost center to a profit center,” says the customer service manager. With babelforce and Zendesk working together, that dream was finally within reach.

More efficient agents, happier customers

Updating the company’s CX solution had an immediate impact on the Ratioparts team. Agents were more efficient, and the new technology was such a step up from their previous system, that the entire team felt instantly less frustrated. But it wasn’t just about the team’s experience–Ratioparts customers were seeing changes, too.

With a stable phone system in place, customers could rely on uninterrupted interactions when they needed support. Random disconnections were a thing of the past, and a better overall experience helped lower the call abandon rate. Now, the CX team can track the abandonment rate more closely and work to reduce it. Gone are the days of customer complaints about not being able to contact a customer service representative.

“When we have an idea, it’s easy to adjust the system or to extend the functions. We’re not fighting to have just the basic system working,” says the customer service manager.

Even better, the transformation will be easy to measure because babelforce integrates with Zendesk reporting, so Ratioparts can monitor its abandonment rate in the wider context of all customer service activities.

Less frustration for everybody

The switch to babelforce and Zendesk reduced frustration across the board. So who benefits the most? “Our customers,” according to the customer service manager. “And honestly, it will make life easier for all of us, especially for the agents.”

“We have a lot of customers calling us because they want a copy of an invoice or delivery note. The system can do that for us automatically. And that allows the agents to handle other important matters.”

Previously, agents might get six calls in a row, and then try to remember “what happened on the second call?” This is no longer a concern, with automated ticketing and the ability to add an internal note in the system and assign it automatically to the warehouse or product marketing–wherever it needs to go.

More time for innovation

At Ratioparts, the team’s ingenuity can now go at full throttle, with babelforce and Zendesk providing the engine for change. When fine-tuning its customer service hotline, team members were delighted to finally have a system to assist with that. As the customer service manager explains, they can now do “fancy stuff” like directing certain customer groups to the company’s website, voicemail, or ticket support.

But for the customer service leadership, the true value of using an integrated, omnichannel system is that it keeps them from getting bogged down in the day-to-day demands of support. Before, they were constantly putting out fires with technical issues. Troubleshooting was a daily drill and keeping the team’s morale high took a lot of effort. With hundreds of other areas needing attention, leadership wanted a system that would run smoothly without constant oversight. They now have exactly that, and more.

Growth on the horizon

Looking ahead, Ratioparts plans to take full advantage of everything the new tech stack has to offer. For example, the CX leadership team is keen on doing more with AI to automate simple, repetitive requests, like asking for a copy of an invoice or a delivery note.

But what they’re most excited about is the transition from a reactive service model to a proactive, revenue-generating force. With a more streamlined system, Ratioparts can dedicate additional agents to customer outreach, an opportunity they couldn’t have imagined before.