About Hindbag
Hindbag is a French brand that sells ethical, trendy bags and accessories. The brand collaborates with SSMI, an Indian NGO that empowers women from an underprivileged neighborhood in Delhi. These women create textile accessories in exchange for fair wages that recognize their skills and a place in school for their children.
Beyond its social commitment, Hindbag uses 100% organic materials certified by the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) or recycled materials certified by the Global Recycled Standard (GRS). Equally as important as its product quality and production process is Hindbag’s customer experience — especially as the brand quickly expanded.
The Challenge: Improving responsiveness and customer retention in a period of rapid growth
Hindbag’s revenue grew significantly in a short period, increasing from €1.3 million in 2022 to €5.7 million in 2023. This hypergrowth was caused by viral products, SEO optimization, and positioning that appealed to its target market in terms of price, quality, and ethical values. This led to frequent supply delays and products going out of stock, increasing customer service inquiries.
This year of exponential growth brought on two main challenges:
- Scaling customer service
- Improving customer retention
Customer service challenges
More orders meant more tickets. A sudden surge in the number of emails made it difficult for Hindbag’s small support team to keep up.
Hindbag’s previous approach involved two support agents managing a shared email inbox. However, this left room for human error. As Isabelle Spiri, Brand Director at Hindbag, explains, “Sometimes they replied to the same email at the same time, or didn’t see that an email had already been handled and replied to it a second time. This led to wasted time and conflicting responses.”
To overcome this, each agent started forwarding emails to their personal accounts for follow-up. This created another obstacle, though—the lack of a centralized inbox led to missed messages and inefficiency as the agents tried to determine if an email had already been answered by their colleague.
Hindbag needed a tool that would enable the team to manage all incoming support tickets in one place—easing its customer support workload while improving the experience for its customers.
Customer retention challenges
As Hindbag scaled, it needed a strategy to retain all of its newly acquired customers. The team wanted to tackle its low repeat purchase rate, engage and retain customers, as well as reactivate dormant shoppers.
To incentivize repeat business, the team knew they needed to introduce a long-term solution, like a loyalty program, if they wanted to continue their growth trajectory.
The turning point: Stock issues that caused a flood of tickets
The team quickly realized that their current process of operating from one shared inbox wasn’t sustainable. The customer support team was wasting time and effort — all while customer frustration was increasing.
When the Spring/Summer 2023 collection launched in April, demand was higher than ever thanks to the popularity of its Banana belt bags. This caused stock issues as items sold out quicker than expected, which brought a high volume of inquiries about order status, product availability, and restock timelines. This overwhelmed the team, making it clear that something had to change.
The Solution: Introducing Gorgias and Loyoly to its tech stack
Hindbag implemented Gorgias and Loyoly to reduce internal inefficiencies and maximize customer loyalty by centralizing all customer interactions into one dashboard. With visibility into customer loyalty information, Hindbag’s support team was able to personalize interactions and prioritize high-value VIP customers.
Several key features of Gorgias’s Helpdesk solved Hindbag’s challenges:
- Ticket Assignment: Each ticket is assigned to a specific person, eliminating duplicate responses or lost tickets.
- Macros: These pre-written response templates reduced customer support response times by up to 80% for simple tickets.
- Consistent Messaging: Using Macros eliminated the previous response inconsistency by following the same rules and language. Now, each customer receives the same experience regardless of who answers them.
- Shopify Integration: Customer details are pulled directly into the ticket view from Shopify. This improves the level of personalization in each response by filling in the gaps from unclear customer inquiries.
- Loyoly Integration: This provides improved customer insights from customer loyalty data like the number of points, VIP tiers, referrals, rewards earned, and more. This powers customized communication, like acknowledging highly engaged customers or celebrating birthdays.
“We needed a solution that was easy to implement and fully integrated with our existing stack. Gorgias’s seamless integration with Shopify and Loyoly made all the difference.”
— Isabelle Spiri, Brand Director at Hindbag
Implementation process
Going from one shared email account to Gorgias’s Helpdesk was a welcomed change for Hindbag’s team. Despite having no experience with helpdesk solutions, the team was eager to test the solution.
“I connected Gorgias to Shopify very quickly. I spent 2 hours creating the Macros, connected the team, and we were off! It was very intuitive, even though no one had ever used this type of tool before.”
— Isabelle Spiri, Brand Director at Hindbag
Hindbag introduced Gorgias at a pivotal time. “We were in a rush period and had absolutely no time for team training,” Isabelle tells us. “We were receiving between 80 and 150 messages per day from customers that needed immediate attention.”
As Hindbag managed its growth obstacles, such as supply shortages and frustrated customers, it relied on Gorgias’s easy-to-use interface to make replying to customers and de-escalating complaints straightforward.
Hindbag then connected Loyoly to Gorgias in just a few clicks. Customers' loyalty program information was instantly reflected on their Gorgias profile or within tickets. This made it possible for Hindbag to tailor each customer interaction—something that simply wasn’t possible before.
The Results: Faster Response Times, Higher CSAT Scores, and Increased Repeat Purchase Rates
- 50% Reduction in Customer Response Times: By leveraging Macros and integrations, customer wait times have dropped by 50%. Messaging is also much more consistent, improving the customer experience.
- 4.6/5 Average CSAT Score: Hindbag’s customer service is more personalized due to better insights into customer behavior (Loyoly) and purchasing history (Shopify).
- 12x Increase in Repeat Purchase Rate: Integrating with Loyoly has improved the handling of tickets related to loyalty points and rewards codes. This has led to better customer retention, with repeat purchase rate rising 12x amongst active loyalty program members.
Looking forward: Going further with automation and AI
Hindbag’s success with Gorgias and Loyoly has the team looking for even more ways to level up its customer experience.
The team plans to introduce automation and AI through Gorgias to create even more efficiency in their customer service. With the help of AI Agent and self-service Flows, Hindbag’s customers will receive even faster support. Gorgias’s automation tools can also reduce the strain on Hindbag’s small support team by handling routine queries like order status or shipping updates. Instead, they can focus where it counts — supporting their best customers to build brand loyalty.
Browse Gorgias’s network of 100+ integrations to empower your support team with better customer insights from all your favorite tools.
