Overview & Challenges
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (A&F Co.) is a leading global speciality retailer of apparel and accessories for men, women and kids through five renowned brands. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. operates over 750 stores under these brands across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as the e-commerce sites.
Before engaging with EdgeTier, A&F Co. had already realised there was significant value locked inside customer support conversations and had a strong desire to increase the visibility of customer support data. Specifically, there was a need to inspect conversations and cross-check feedback, a process that historically had not been automated.
A&F Co. also had a desire to improve the agent quality assurance (QA) process, to minimize the number of conversations had while also improving the quality of interactions. Additionally, the day-to-day operations and workforce management teams required a strong need to accurately understand the impacts of policy changes, where a lot of additional manual effort was required to understand why contact volumes exceeded forecasts or why customer behaviour was changing.
How EdgeTier Brought Customer Data to the Fore
EdgeTier’s technology seamlessly integrated with A&F Co.’s existing customer service platform to monitor customer service conversations - analysing both customer and agent messages in real time. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. makes use of many aspects of EdgeTier’s functionality including anomaly detection, agent QA, phrase tagging, custom reporting and general exploration capabilities.
Proactive Anomaly Detection:
Real-time monitoring and alerting of unusual topics (anomalies) provides Abercrombie & Fitch Co. with proactive alerts on any issue that needs immediate attention. Anomaly detection not only uncovers unusual issues in real-time, but it also quantifies the size of the issues and breaks down which customers are talking about the issue. In addition to helping Abercrombie & Fitch Co. react to issues quickly, anomaly detection also unearths hidden issues and provides insight into opportunities for improvement that would have been more difficult to investigate.
“The anomaly feature is a game changer for us. It’s highly accurate and has helped us identify customer issues, agent errors, and even fraud that would have taken us longer to catch.”
- Nick Brazitis Global Customer Care Manager
Quantifying Impact:
A key change is the ability to clearly quantify and report on exactly what customers are talking about in real-time. Using EdgeTier’s flexible tagging technology, customer messages are automatically tagged based on the topic of conversation, making it easier to determine if there is more feedback regarding one topic more than another.
“During our peak volume periods, we send out daily updates about what customers are talking about and key trends we are seeing, allowing us to determine which departments need to be informed of certain scenarios, thanks to the tagging technology provided in this platform."
- Nick Brazitis Global Customer Care Manager
Improving Quality.
Through tagging agent messages, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. is now able to rapidly identify coaching opportunities that may have been missed prior. EdgeTier’s technology scans every single message sent by agents, providing 100% coverage.
Greater Visibility and Predictability.
Data generated by the EdgeTier system is extremely accessible and is used to make more informed decisions. For example, after updating a policy in the US, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. was able to accurately quantify the impact the policy change had on contact rates, as well as understand customer sentiment regarding the update. As they expanded the policy to European markets, it was possible to accurately forecast the impact on contact volumes in Europe and get ahead of common customer inquiries relating to the change, minimising any potential disruption.
Working with EdgeTier?
Of course, working with EdgeTier is not just about providing a technology platform, so we asked the Abercrombie & Fitch Co. team about what working with EdgeTier is like. Here are some of their comments:
“The onboarding process was super easy, the team was very agreeable and made the process seamless. We are very impressed with EdgeTier’s responsiveness – we typically get a response to any question almost immediately.”
“We appreciate that EdgeTier is proactively advocating for features and functionality before we ask for it.”
“We love that the EdgeTier team is very hands-on. It is also exciting to be able to influence the future capabilities of the tool.”
“We really appreciate the collaborative partnership and the openness to new ideas that we have with EdgeTier.”
- Nick Brazitis Global Customer Care Manager
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and EdgeTier will continue their partnership and expand the use of EdgeTier’s technology in other channels, as well as take an even bigger role in analysing customer and agent conversations.
