The popular retail brand was able to improve the customer experience across channels and implement real-time order notifications.

Urbanic is an eCommerce women’s fashion company founded in January 2019 that serves large markets in India, Mexico, and Brazil.

Challenge

Women's clothing is a competitive market, and it was especially important to Urbanic to differentiate themselves with superior customer service – they were growing fast and wanted to provide a top-notch experience. However, they sell solely from a mobile app and were struggling to connect their own system with third-party channels. Urbanic experienced several key roadblocks with their communications.

The customer experience was disjointed. Juggling separate platforms for WhatsApp, email, SMS, and in-app chat was becoming increasingly difficult, and conversations across channels were not synchronized.

Customers weren’t receiving timely updates. They wanted to send real-time order notifications, but they were running into continued roadblocks when trying to send quick and accurate updates to customers after a purchase, including low delivery rates.
Other vendors were proving to be too complex and technical. Urbanic didn’t have the technical resources to support complicated integrations. The customer success team found themselves constantly requiring vendor support to help with seemingly simple requests.

All of this made it difficult for Urbanic to provide the seamless online shopping experience they were striving to offer – so Krishna Gautam, Head of Customer Experience, and Ashutosh Sharma, General Manager, began looking for an omnichannel solution to optimize customer communications. They needed something easy to use that did not require a lot of technical bandwidth, and they wanted more ownership over their various channels.

Solution

Urbanic’s ultimate goal was to integrate multiple channels under one umbrella. After evaluating several solutions, they chose MessageBird due to the user-friendly interface and the ability to see every channel in a single console. Krishna and Ashutosh decided to implement a phased approach and start with the most popular channel: WhatsApp.

Sending order notifications via WhatsApp

Urbanic was actively searching for a way to improve purchase confirmations and real-time shipping notifications. With MessageBird’s WhatsApp API, they were able to quickly and easily implement automated alerts that simplified their entire ordering process.

“With MessageBird, we can now set up WhatsApp communication flows in hours instead of days.”
–Krishna Gautam, Head of Customer Experience at Urbanic

Implementing NPS surveys for streamlined customer feedback

The Urbanic team also wanted to collect more customer feedback, but their technical team never had the bandwidth to build NPS surveys within their own software. Using WhatsApp, they were able to easily conduct an NPS survey as part of the conversation triggered after a new purchase. This has saved them thousands on internal resources and system costs.

Increasing customer engagement and responsesUrbanic’s average customer response rate was hovering around 40% prior to optimizing the experience. When implementing these new WhatsApp flows, they were able to hold true two-way conversations with customers. More importantly, they were also able to ensure high delivery rates so their notifications are actually received.

Results

Urbanic now sees a delivery rate of 98-99% for all of their real-time order notifications – and with better delivery comes better engagement. Thanks to WhatsApp, they now see a 70% response rate from customers, representing a 30% increase in positive customer engagement.

In turn, these significant improvements to customer communication have reduced Urbanic’s inbound customer inquiries by 30%, particularly in regard to shipping questions.

Lastly, Urbanic has achieved an 8% response rate on their WhatsApp NPS surveys, a net-new initiative for the team. They were used to seeing a 3% response rate on CSAT surveys via email, so they are thrilled with these early NPS results.

Overall, Urbanic has gained the ability to see conversations from all of their different channels within a single console. Thanks to these WhatsApp results, they are now optimizing their chatbot, SMS, and email channels.