Peak Design Case Study
How Peak Design, a 100% crowdfunded camera gear company with a
fiercely loyal customer base, delivers an exceptional customer experience.
(CLICK TO WATCH TESTIMONIAL)
San Franciso
Scaling their customer service team to support
their rapid growth while maintaining a great
company culture
An outsourcing strategy that is integrated
with their vision for customer service
An engaged remote customer service team
driving high productivity & improved customer
satisfaction rates.
Peak Design is a company based in San Francisco that designs and engineers professional grade camera accessories for photographers of all types and abilities.
Since 2011, they have raised $34M+ over the course of 10 Kickstarter projects and are now regarded as the world’s most crowdfunded active company with over 100+ products manufactured for the photography industry.
Peak Design has employed 24 full-time remote employees across Customer Service, Wholesale, IT, and Graphic Design through our Staff Leasing service.
After repeatedly launching successful Kickstarter campaigns, Peak Design has garnered a positive reputation attracting a high volume of customers.
Peak Design highly nurtures their in-house talent but are open to the acquisition of more human resources that can add to the experience of Peak Design. With their rapid growth and the customer support tickets piling up for their in-house team, it became clear that in order to keep up with the increasing global interest for their products, Peak Design needed to outsource their customer service to support multiple communication channels while covering different timezones for their international customers. In addition, the administrative burden of hiring in-house staff was not cost-effective and was very time-consuming.
Peak Design understands the importance of customer experience and how this goes hand in hand with customer retention so they looked into expanding their customer support operations to achieve the following:
Build a highly skilled customer service team that is culture fit to their brand
Focus on excellent customer service to gain customer trust and prevent them from churning
Improve Ticket Request Fulfillment
Increase customer retention and customer satisfaction scores
Interact with customers on a variety of communication channels
Be able to focus on researching & developing new products for their customers
To build their envisioned dedicated customer service team, Booth & Partners provided Peak Design with a shortlist of pre-vetted, highly-skilled talent who matches their culture and business needs. Peak Design was able to get to know each candidate individually, assessing whether their soft skills will be the right fit for their team.
They initially started with 3 employees (a Team Leader and 2 Senior Customer Service Associates) under a fully managed service model where Booth & Partners was responsible for managing the day-to-day operations, with key performance indicators that include CSAT and service-level agreements to meet the daily target of handling customer service tickets within a 6-month period.
After a 6-month period, Peak Design was confident in their team and processes to move from a Managed Services model to a Staff Leasing work-from-home model under the guidance of the Booth & Partners Operations team. To date, the Peak Design team has grown to 13 full-time staff under the customer service team in a fully remote work setup.
Jen Howell, Director of Customer Experience & Logistics at Peak Design
The customer service team has seamlessly adapted into Peak Design’s culture making communications, training, and productivity similar to how the local team in the U.S operates.
To date, the customer service teams is now 13 full-time employees strong and currently works in a fully remote work environment.
We bring a spirit of innovation to our employee engagement and wellness initiatives, and give them the same energy and care as our core services and we believe this is what makes our approach exceptional and aligned with Peak Design’s mission. We always have been people first and understand our employees’ wellbeing from a holistic perspective.
Improving customer satisfaction is important for Peak Design to maintain or enhance their customer relationships. It reflects the degree to which they have managed to provide a customer experience that meets expectations. Customer service satisfaction is measured by understanding how their customers interact with their brand and collecting their feedback through surveys using different channels. Majority of these customer tickets are mostly order related (warranty, refunds, shipping issues, etc.)
Quality customer service involves providing efficient, quick, and friendly service to customers as well as building strong relationships with them. It also entails responding to customers’ issues in time and handling any complaints swiftly.
Peak Design created a quality matrix and guideline for 3 important points for Quality Assurance: the opening spiel, the resolution provided, and the closing (that the ticket is properly documented).
Looking at every customer’s touchpoint has helped Peak Design to personalize messages and respond through the right channel. Their remote customer service team handles a multitude of customer support tickets from warranties to order handling and shipping issues daily, covering multiple channels to provide customer service and support such as email, live chat, sms and social media. This allowed them to also have an increased visibility on various communication platforms, a factor that will further improve their customer service.
For geographic flexibility and to support its international customers, the team operates in (2) separate shifts based on the California time zone. These are 9am – 6pm and 10pm – 7am.
Prior to outsourcing their Customer Service function, Peak Design had no structured reporting system for their customer service activities. We were able to help them create customer service reports providing an overview of their support team’s weekly operations, individual agent performance, customer ticket analytics and customer interactions. Data gathered from these reports offer insights into best practices their team should maintain and the areas for improvement.
If you want to find out how our tailor-fit customer service solution
can help your business scale on a deeper level, then don’t be afraid
to schedule a call or request a quote today! Let’s transform your
brand together with the right people and right solutions.
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