Mack Weldon Partners with Simplr to Scale Customer Service, Convert New Customers, and Support Accelerated Growth

How a high-growth ecommerce brand is “walking the walk” when it comes to customer experience, thanks to expanded live chat and a focus on conversational commerce.

Mack Weldon, a high-growth premium men’s basics brand, partners with Simplr to strengthen its “customer first” ethos. Through expanded live chat availability and support, Mack Weldon is able to provide industry-leading customer service speed and quality at scale. The brand has also achieved a 28% conversion rate and enhanced the overall buying process with Simplr’s Conversational Commerce capabilities, helping to turn their CX organization into a revenue driver and strengthening their marketing ROI.    

The challenge: creating a competitive edge with CX

Mack Weldon realized that in the incredibly competitive ecommerce landscape they could not solely rely on their premium products to attract repeat buyers. They knew that investing in their brand and their customer experience is what will ultimately elevate their standing as a premier brand, especially in a post-pandemic world.

“We’re investing a lot in marketing, a lot in expanding our retail footprint, and a lot into customer experience to make sure our name is known as a premier men’s basics provider,” said Pat Feehan, Customer Service Manager at Mack Weldon. “But especially from a customer service standpoint, we’re focused on how we can scale up service to meet the demand that our increased brand awareness creates.”

Mack Weldon’s Senior Manager Customer Service, Sam Roden added: “Our goal for customer experience at Mack Weldon is to walk the walk. As our brand recognition grows we don’t want to just be seen as a company that’s really great, but when you interact with us, we are really great. We want to avoid the trap that a lot of companies get into where customers get attracted to a brand and get excited, but then get let down with not great service when they hit the site.” 

To achieve their goals around delivering a premium customer service, Mack Weldon ultimately decided to look for help outside their organization.  

Why turn to Simplr? To provide customer service levels that can’t be achieved with the traditional model

As the company invested more and more into its marketing engine to keep driving customer growth (including the launch of its first ever TV commercial), Mack Weldon needed a way to ensure it could achieve aspirational service levels in a scalable and efficient way.  

Solely relying on internal staffing with a traditional contact center was not going to cut it; it would mean too many compromises on the customer experience they wanted to deliver.

“It’s hard for CS teams because we often have to sacrifice that value-added type of service levels because of staffing limitations. But we realized Simplr would be able to help us relieve some of those limitations so that we can focus on driving the best service possible,” said Pat.  

Rapid time-to-value, without the headache of traditional outsourcer onboarding

As Mack Weldon’s web traffic soared, the team not only knew they needed help, but knew they needed it quickly to maintain exceptional customer service levels.

Some of the reasons they ultimately chose to partner with Simplr were:

• Quick ramp time
• Lack of onboarding roadblocks 
• Accelerated time-to-value

“The speed of launch with Simplr was amazing. We really needed Simplr’s help like three months before we found them, so we needed it as fast as possible. Traditional third-party contact centers I’ve worked with have needed weeks and sometimes months to hire, train, and get all those folks up to speed. So for Simplr to get up and running in barely a week and start taking tickets was incredible to see.” 

Pat Feehan, Customer Service Manager at Mack Weldon

Delivering premium-quality responses that were indistinguishable from their own team

Understandably, the CX team at Mack Weldon had initial worries about folks from outside their organization, who didn’t go through their normal training and onboarding processes, fielding customer conversations for the first time. How would these specialists stay on brand? How would they provide the same level of accuracy as our team? How would their tone match ours? 

However, as soon as the specialists from Simplr’s Human Cloud Network started taking tickets, thanks to the enablement from Simplr’s AI-Powered Platform, the team’s concerns quickly dissipated as they saw the high level of quality that Simplr was able to provide. 

“Our concern when looking outside of our own team for customer service help was a dilution of our brand,” said Pat. “Handing our customer conversations over to Simplr, with agents who are pretty much anonymous to us, was definitely nerve-wracking at first. But I was so pleasantly surprised when I started seeing the first Simplr-handled tickets come in, and it was exactly what I would have expected to see from a Mack Weldon agent” 

While the team was happy with the quality they were seeing, they were just as happy with Simplr’s ability to implement feedback and make adjustments quickly and effectively.  

Pat went on to add, “When we had any coaching or things we wanted to adjust or redirect on, the feedback process with Simplr has been really easy.  The Simplr account reps have been so responsive and available to us as needed, and all of that coaching gets applied to all of their specialists really quickly.” 

Giving Mack Weldon the tools to provide a truly customer-first experience

Thanks to the service quality and scalability Simplr was able to provide, Simplr has helped Mack Weldon achieve their goals of providing best-in-class CX, and has provided a truly customer-first experience through: 

• Expanded Live Chat Availability:  Simplr’s ability to provide always-on 24/7 service enabled Mack Weldon to ensure they could engage more customers on their site by expanding their chat availability beyond traditional business hours.
• Industry-Leading Customer Service Speed & Quality: Simplr has provided Mack Weldon with an average first response time of 23 minutes over email and 12 seconds over chat, all while achieving an average CSAT score of 4.84/5 across all tickets.  

Transforming CX into a revenue driver with Simplr’s conversational commerce capabilities

Simplr also enables Mack Weldon to provide the value-added service levels that “mirror the in-store experience” and helps to provide a strategic differentiator for the brand, through cConversational cCommerce. 

Simplr’s conversational commerce capabilities, which use AI to enable all Simplr Specialists to make personalized product recommendations based on a customer’s inquiry and/or their past purchase history, has resulted in a 28% conversion rate from conversation to purchase (an 8 point lift on conversion rates before conversational commerce was utilized) and enhanced the buying process for Mack Weldon customers. 

“When buyers on our site have questions about our products, we really want to mirror those engagements that they would get in a store- letting customers have real conversations with us, and making buying easier. Our goal isn’t to act as salespeople, but being able to recommend products they might like based on what they’re asking about or what they’ve bought from us before often adds a lot of value to the experience.” 

To tie it all up, Simplr’s Revenue Insights Dashboard has begun enabling Mack Weldon’s CX team to highlight and prove how their commitment to providing exceptional service is truly impacting the business beyond typical operational service metrics: 

“It’s hard in CX to show meaningful results to leadership beyond CSAT sometimes. So being able to report out  [with the Simplr Revenue Dashboard] on how our engagement strategy can drive revenue, and how we help the bottom line is a huge win.  It’s great for us to be recognized for things other than CSAT.”