Company Overview
Darn Good Yarn is an online yarn store dedicated to supporting women's economic empowerment and fair trade practices. Darn Good Yarn isn’t your run-of-the-mill yarn. There are special stories of hard work, love and creativity wrapped into everything you find at Darn Good Yarn. From the artisan to the person who packs the orders, Darn Good Yarn is fueled by infusing Good into all parts of its business, while building a strong and unique relationship all over the supply chain.
“Gorgias has been incremental in cutting down response & resolution time as well as increasing customer retention. Performing generic customer service tasks outside of Gorgias takes around 17 seconds per ticket. Performing these actions inside of Gorgias takes around 1.5 seconds per ticket. It’s about 335 customer service hours a year we are saving!”
Amanda Schermerhorn, Director of Operations
Challenge
Everything started in 2008, with Nicole Snow, founder at Darn Good Yarn, who turned her passion for knitting into what has become a fantastic company and a team of 14 people.
Like every business, when Darn Good Yarn started out, there was only a few orders per week that Nicole could handle by herself. From a few yarn products, Nicole and her growing team started expanding the collection to accessories and home goods. Over time, Darn Good Yarn grew into a complete clothing brand company, with skirts becoming their best seller and biggest revenue driver.
Along with the expanding product range, Darn Good Yarn’s subscription program has grown substantially (and more rapidly than expected!) over the last 2 years. Each month, the company delivers thoughtfully sourced boxes of crafting materials right to their doorstep. Today, over 50% of customer support tickets are related to the subscription boxes.
Using Gorgias integrations to improve support quality
To handle recurring orders, Darn Good Yarn is using ReCharge, combined with Shopify. Therefore, the company quickly needed a helpdesk that provides a strong integration with both technologies: and that’s when Darn Good Yarn switched from Freshdesk to Gorgias in June 2017, cutting down on the first response time and resolution time.
Instead of having to open up 3 different apps at the same time to handle a subscription-related support ticket, Darn Good Yarn agents are now able to perform Shopify and ReCharge actions directly from their helpdesk. They also automate the resolution of some common issues (refund, edit order, cancel subscription etc.) by embedding these actions to Gorgias macros. The ability to customize macros and attach very specific actions to them gives Gorgias users an unparalleled power to resolve customer inquiries in a personalized and timely fashion.
Another feature that was key to making the switch to Gorgias was the variety and quality of the customer information that can be displayed on the right sidebar of each ticket, pulled from Shopify and ReCharge. Being able to see the whole customer history while talking to a client was crucial for customer experience at Darn Good Yarn, especially when most of the questions are related to billing and shipping date.
Finally, using macros has proven efficient for retention and customer time value. “When a customer knocks on the door saying he wants to cancel his subscription, we usually send the macro that suggests to skip one month or to switch his subscription, instead of cancelling”. One click using Gorgias macros can save a customer! At Darn Good Yarn, they also have a customer support manager who reviews all the macros before sending, which is also a way to unify how the company speaks to its customers.
Darn Good Yarn is a startup...And so is Gorgias!
As a team of 14 people that likes to act fast, Darn Good Yarn was really enthusiastic to work with another startup to improve their customer support. At Gorgias, we release new features every month, depending on what our users ask the most for and that’s one of the things that Darn Good Yarn likes about Gorgias.
“Gorgias staff has been super helpful with the set up, we had such a good connection! They know who we are and what we need.”
Amanda Schermerhorn, Director of Operations
As an example, Darn Good Yarn is currently trying to find additional ways to empower its customer service agents. Agents can do much more than answer support tickets: they can be revenue drivers as well if they are well trained and have the right tools, such as the Gorgias live chat. At Gorgias, we love to help Darn Good Yarn implement it further, building a customer support guide or new features to serve our users’ needs.
Results
Performing generic customer service tasks without Gorgias takes around 17 seconds per ticket. Performing these actions inside of Gorgias takes around 1.5 seconds per ticket. Multiply that out over the average number of subscription support tickets they receive per week then multiply that out on a yearly basis - it’s about 335 customer service hours a year, that is 2 months of work of one person, the company is saving.
