How Liberty uses Zendesk QA to provide luxury customer service

Liberty is a renowned luxury department store. With a strong brand reputation, the company aims to elevate customer service to match its product standards. Liberty has used Zendesk for eight years, and Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus) for two years.

Sophie Elgar, Quality and Training Manager at Liberty, shares how the company made QA a pivotal role in enhancing customer experience and streamlining the customer service teams.

“As a renowned luxury goods company, elevating our customer service to match our reputation is crucial. Zendesk QA provides us with clear quality oversight, pinpointing the exact areas needing improvement,” says Elgar.

Liberty’s customer service team operates from three locations: the customer-facing team in the flagship London store, a central London team of support agents, and an outsourced customer team in South Africa. Conversations from every faction of support undergo quality assurance reviews through Zendesk QA.

Over the two years that they have been using Zendesk QA, both CSAT and IQS scores have consistently improved (currently at 80 percent IQS and 88 percent CSAT).

Defining luxury customer service and how to measure it

Liberty uses Zendesk as an all-in-one platform for email, phone, and chat, using Zentalk to record conversations to review through Zendesk QA. Customers can also speak to them face-to-face at the flagship London store.

In comparison with competitors, Liberty found Zendesk QA’s ease of use as a stand out. It had all of the features needed for an effective quality assurance program that could involve the entire team.

Quality differs from company to company. Tracking metrics and improving KPIs may be priorities, but teams need to first define their overall support goals and internal values before setting a path to improvement. Zendesk offered ideas and advice to Liberty about creating the best scorecard and quality program to match their objectives.

“We are always talking about ‘Liberty magic’ and what that consists of. Liberty magic is all about creating a luxury, memorable experience for the customer, and we find that this happens when agents go above and beyond on the soft skills – making the customer feel heard, special and valued, so we embedded that in our scorecard,” explains Elgar.

“On top of that, we use up to 15 different systems on a daily basis and there are so many different products. There’s so much information and it’s important to keep that fresh,” Elgar adds.

Agent evaluations at Liberty are based 50 percent on quality (CSAT and QA reviews), 30 percent on productivity, and 20 percent on knowledge. Elgar runs monthly 1:1 sessions with each team member for a quality-focused coaching session where they review Zendesk QA scores and data. Additionally, there are weekly emails and monthly quizzes to keep product and promotional knowledge fresh.

Liberty’s scorecards are divided into four main categories:
– Communication
– Compliance
– Soft skills
– Resolutions

What is ‘Liberty Magic’?

Liberty magic represents a customer service ethos that embodies exceptional standards. It encompasses several key principles:

Make it special: Going beyond the basics to provide an experience that leaves customers happier than when they first engaged. This involves being fully present and engaged to deliver personalized interactions.

Accountability: Agents taking ownership of customer inquiries, documenting internal notes to ensure transparency and reliability throughout the customer interaction.

Growth Mindset: Maintaining a proactive approach to product, process, and promotions knowledge. Agents should offer informed assistance and adapt to evolving customer needs.

Initiative: Proactively fulfilling their role as much as possible, e.g. using face-to-face interactions with colleagues at Liberty to find the fastest solutions, and keeping on top of their ticket workload.

Communication: Ensuring swift, accurate, and friendly communication with customers to address their inquiries promptly. Internally, communication should always be respectful and helpful.

Maintaining consistency across every interaction

As the quality manager for outsourced, contact center, and customer-facing teams, one of Elgar’s key focuses is making sure that no matter who the customer is talking to, they receive a quality of support that is of Liberty standard.

“Working with an agent that is not in the same country, you sometimes have difficulties in terms of cultures and communication styles. We have to make sure the brand voice is being communicated consistently – whether or not a customer is talking to an agent in London or Cape Town,” says Elgar.

“The flagship team in particular are really highly scored through their email communications. They are on the ground meeting customers and handling escalated tickets about in-store purchases,” explains Elgar. “Whereas in a contact center there is more of a distance, since any interaction starts from phone, email, or chat, and that can affect quality. So we take communication tips and tricks from the flagship team to bring all team scores to that level.”

Zendesk AI helps deliver the right balance

Liberty also leverages several Zendesk AI features to enhance the level of customer support. “Zendesk’s tone shift really helps. It’s about getting the balance right: not sounding like a robot, especially if the macros are written in a more formal language but it’s a customer agents already have a good relationship with.”

Liberty uses Zendesk’s intelligent triage to automatically sort and direct incoming tickets to the right agents, which entails AI recognizing and categorizing customer intent, sentiment, and language. This allows the team to get rid of manual triaging completely, setting up rules for tickets to go to agents with the most expertise in each area.

Zendesk tone shift also helps agents tailor responses to perfection. Liberty uses the tone shift “Make more friendly” option to offer message adjustments that will bring every response in line with the brand.

Detecting improvements and calibrating

“We need to provide great customer service 100 percent of the time,” offers Elgar. “Zendesk QA has helped us maintain focus on the consistency of quality and identify specific areas where we need to improve.”

Although Elgar conducts the majority of reviews herself, it is important for team leads to also be involved in the process. Using Assignments, Elgar has automated the review cadence so that team members consistently receive reviews from team leads as well.

These regular reviews help every QA reviewer understand and assess how effectively each Liberty agent adopts the brand’s tone and responds to the tonal assistance provided by Zendesk AI features.

Liberty is able to reinforce this consistency by calibrating all feedback through Calibration sessions. Regular sessions help all reviewers calibrate their scoring, using the same setup and logic as their routine QA reviews. Elgar conducts monthly calibration sessions to keep all team reviews aligned.

“I find the Calibrations feature one of the most useful tools for me. When you’re a person who is constantly doing reviews, you may not remain as objective as you need to be,” says Elgar. “Calibrations get me back to the base point – I love how interactive the feature is, everyone can see the scores. We do them internally and with outsourced teams.”

Coaching and tracking progress

QA isn’t just about feedback collection; it’s a cornerstone for coaching and progress tracking. As a certified coach, Elgar uses Zendesk QA as a tool for both quantitative analysis and qualitative development during sessions.

Coaching Sessions offers a space for coaches and support agents to pin conversations, make action points, and track past and planned sessions. Elgar implements regular training structured around establishing rapport and building customer relationships.

“It’s basically a training needs analysis that I’m doing every time I’m reviewing a ticket and I give feedback directly in our sessions. In the Sessions feature I put all my notes, so they can see everything for our 1:1s,” Elgar explains.

“Reviews and feedback are very consistent, and we’ve got a really good process for improving right now. Zendesk QA’s ease of use really helps the team understand everything. It’s about having it front of mind for everyone, that has really helped us with higher metrics.”

Consistent reviews and the facilitation of feedback sessions have led to a robust process for improvement at Liberty. While the organization currently maintains high service scores across all teams, there’s a continuous drive to elevate standards even further.

Quality results plans for the future

Although the retail company’s scores are impressive, Liberty has set goals to reach new heights: increasing CSAT to 90 percent and IQS to 85 percent. So how are they investing their resources to make this a reality?

– Increase the number of reviews
– Hire someone else to take on review tasks
– Conduct targeted monthly workshops based on issues picked up on through reviews

“We’re at a really good place with the scores for all teams. But it’s about consistently getting it even higher,” explains Elgar. “The data we’re able to get from Zendesk QA is at the core of our plans for this year.”

Does Liberty’s commitment to excellent customer service inspire you?

The luxury department store’s dedication to ensuring consistency within a diverse team structure, along with their determination to use data-driven coaching to enhance metric scores, is a goal that many customer service teams aspire to achieve.

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