ASICS CASE STUDY
How ASICS boosted performance over 130%
ASICS needed a highly skilled and strategic customer experience team to support a rapid transition into more extensive e-commerce and direct customer sales during the pandemic.
Global Response helped them transform their omnichannel customer solutions and scale for outstanding business results.
How Global Response helps
businesses like you
Goals
Scale customer experience management to respond to a sudden 80% increase in customer contacts and improve customer satisfaction.
Challenges
Surge in demand and customer contacts, and a shift in volume to e-commerce and direct customer sales, without an omnichannel solution to support it.
Results
After switching to Global Response, ASICS began operating on an omnichannel support solution which reduced time to answer, improved the customer feedback loop, and boosted customer satisfaction.
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Increasing efficiency and engagement with customer experience solutions
It’s hard to miss the iconic ASICS logo on athletic shoes and apparel. ASICS is a global powerhouse in the sportswear industry and is especially renowned for their athletic shoes—a favorite of professional athletes and fitness enthusiasts alike.
ASICS began with the philosophy of “sound mind and body,” and now, ASICS is one of the most trusted retail companies in the world, boasting an impressive range of unique athletic shoes and apparel.
The challenge
In 2020, the pandemic caused ASICS’ demand to move heavily toward direct-to-consumer e-commerce. At the same time, from April to October 2020, there was an unprecedented 80% increase in contacts from customers.
Timothy Monahan joined the ASICS team as Customer Service Manager in the midst of this rapid transition period. He says, “We were moving into a new space – a higher volume of e-commerce and direct customer sales. We were in uncharted territory. We had a team [at ASICS], but there was not a cohesive idea of the customer service process.”
ASICS heard of Global Response’s reputation for excellence and commitment to continuous improvement and quickly brought us on board.
ASICS + Global Response
In October 2020, our contact center team hit the ground running and took on the challenge of answering 25,000 backlogged customer email inquiries. That was just the beginning of a partnership between Global Response and ASICS that would shape customer interactions with the brand and dramatically increase ASICS’s capacity to interact and grow their consumer base.
Global Response surpassed Timothy Monahan’s expectations. He said, “It is a challenge for any third party to come on, but we were really able to collaborate with Global Response on this expansion. It’s not often you can say you make a 130%+ improvement [in customer service performance] in 8 months. We were so pleased.”
Here’s how we achieved this level of excellence in customer service for ASICS.
Obstacles
- 80% increase in customer contacts from April to October 2020
- Backlog of 25,000+ inquiry emails from customers in October 2020
- Shifting into rapidly increasing demand for DTC e-commerce
- Service levels less than half of target KPIs
- Dire need for omnichannel customer service support
Strategies
During ASICS’s rapid period of growth in the e-commerce sector, our customer service management team employed numerous strategies to tackle a growing influx of customer contact and provide a quality customer experience reflecting ASICS’ high level of commitment to their consumer.
1. Team scalability
Our contact center team saw a need for transparency, clear expectations, and standards for measuring performance and success. We created knowledge base assets for new and existing team members to use while representing the ASICS brand to consumers.
This knowledge base helps to shape our team training, keeps our customer service cohesive, and creates a baseline for continuous improvement. We were able to scale rapidly with these standards and expectations to meet ASICS’s urgent needs.
Tim remarked on the ease of scalability with Global Response: “ASICS started with 20 Global Response agents and myself, then moved up to 30, then 40.”
The dramatic expansion in quality customer support team members allowed ASICS to match the increase in volume.
2. Cross-training in omnichannel support
When our contact center team engaged, there were 25,000 email inquiries to address. Due to overwhelming customer contact, the ASICS team had shut off phone communications and were unable to meet the demand of their email inbox.
We hire exceptionally skilled professionals for our customer experience management team. Each team member was hand-selected based on their aptitudes and ability to go above and beyond for customers on a wide range of channels. This made for ease of training and set aggressive KPI benchmarks.
We were able to efficiently clear the email backlog, and ASICS now has a range of working channels through which customers can easily communicate with the brand, including phone, chat, webcases, and email.
3. Proactive strategy to address consumer demand
We are the voice of the customer for ASICS and we take that responsibility seriously. Through round-table discussions between our teams, we highlight trends and patterns in customer demand and bring that to ASICS’ attention. We are able to be fully transparent with ASICS by using customer feedback about the brand experience.
Our team notices potential areas for growth and improvement before they even reach ASICS’ attention. Rather than react to challenges, we proactively seek them out and create strategic solutions to further enhance the brand experience.
Timothy Monahan remarked that our customer experience management team is ”the frontline and helps us be right there with the customer…The way I look at it is the team is changing customer service by not only reacting to what our customers need but by being proactive and getting ahead of what customers want.”
One team mindset
We aren’t like any other third-party team and our clients recognize that. Timothy Monahan reminds us how important it is to have a one-team mindset:
“The main focus needs to be what do we do for the customer and make sure that their experience is right, and I think the [Global Response] team mirrors that…I’ve worked with third parties in the past, and I’ve felt a level of collaboration with Global Response that I haven’t felt in the past. Before there was always a level of opposition with ‘them’ and ‘us’, whereas with Global Response there is a level of real conversation and fluidness.”
We are YOUR team and have a unique ability to integrate ourselves seamlessly into our client’s culture. This allows for full transparency and access to customer needs and desires.
Outcomes
Here’s what we have accomplished with ASICS to date:
- The backlog is clear, and a fully operational team responds within 12 hours or under to every contact.
- Omnichannel support is fully functional, including voice, email, webcases, and online chat
- Service levels are above the 90% target, a 130% increase
- The speed of answer improved by over 40%
- ASICS has a direct line to customer needs and concerns through our team’s commitment to transparency
- ASICS is growing their brand and the customer experience management team provides “essential feedback” for their growth into new areas of business
“The main focus needs to be what we do for the customer, making sure that their experience is right – and the Global Response team mirrors that. They’re changing customer service by not only reacting to what our customers need but by being proactive and getting ahead of what customers want.”
Timothy Monahan
ASICS Customer Service Manager
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