Plix improves CX while growing at rocket speed

Nutrition and skincare can be intimidating, especially without adequate information. Plix, a leading plant-based health and personal care brand in India, is determined to advocate for a vegan lifestyle and make wellness and nutrition more enjoyable, effective, and approachable for everyone. Founded in 2018, the company produces and markets plant-based foods and topical products on its website.

Setting up for success

In the past few years, Plix has seen a rapid surge in customers. The young team needed a scalable, easy-to-use system for managing growing customer inquiries, educating its customers, and gaining insight into their journeys. “When it comes to improving health outcomes, Indian customers want to see results very quickly,” says Saurov Kakoti, chief product officer at Plix. “So we needed to adjust their expectations by giving them better access to information. We also had to plot appropriately timed and consistent touchpoints to keep shoppers with us long enough for them to see results. Each of these touchpoints meant more data and response management.”

To improve customer support, Plix also needed to bring more clarity to the internal team. “Because we were a startup, a lot of our employees wore many hats and we needed a system to help divide responsibilities and maintain a good track record, all the while upskilling ourselves to meet challenges of growing scale and complexity,” adds Kakoti.

At the time, Plix used multiple tools for managing orders, sales, items, and partners. To streamline the business process, the company started looking at customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that could easily integrate with multiple services. “We took four or five months to evaluate Zendesk with a trial membership, building reports and experimenting with features. We finally realized that the solution offered everything we were looking for,” recalls Shankar Pillai, head of the customer support and logistics team at Plix.

For a smooth Zendesk implementation, the team turned to Padah Solutions, a business process management company. “Padah took away the headache of making technical decisions and enabled us to focus on the most crucial business aspects at hand,” says Kakoti. “Thanks to Padah, we got acquainted with Zendesk at our own pace and we gradually built confidence. Our partner really helped us customize and make the most of the solution.”

Better visibility in and out

In April 2022, Plix made Zendesk its single source of truth—a centralized system for managing customer queries from social media and email, equipped with a knowledge base for agents. “Whenever a customer sends an email, a ticket is created and they receive an automatic response with frequently asked questions and links to helpful articles. This empowers users to look for information themselves,” says Pillai. “We soon started tracking all customer interactions and creating dashboards related to ticket types, CSAT scores, incidence rates, and more, making it easy to see the big picture, prioritize tasks, build internal stakeholder accountability across various functions, and detect the core concerns of our users.”

After cutting through the noise, Plix was able to improve its service. “When multiple customers keep raising the same issue, we can proactively offer information or see if there is room for improvement in our process,” explains Kakoti. “For example, we set up guidelines to avoid shipping products that have less than eight weeks of shelf life to ensure that there is no concern about their safety. Additionally, we enhance customer experience by having internal teams share related ticket data with each other. For example, the logistics team highlights ambiguity in website offers so the marketing team can instantly improve the language.”

The Plix team has also introduced same-day deliveries in some cities to satisfy a common customer request and even improved the products themselves based on user feedback. “We optimized our plant-based effervescent tablets to dissolve in water in less than 150 seconds and created informative cards to manage customer expectations around their benefits,” says Kakoti.

Empowered team, satisfied customers

With higher visibility, Plix can keep better track of team performance and help employees grow. “We generate reports for every agent,” clarifies Kakoti. “If one of them is not performing well, they are guided with a performance improvement plan.”

The increased clarity has also helped Plix manage and anticipate necessary resources more efficiently. “As a company that is growing as fast as we are, we need to scale our workforce accordingly. Looking at the data helps us decide if we need to bring in more agents,” Kakoti adds.

Plix’s strides in customer experience have not gone unnoticed by its customers. “We received around 8,000 tickets in December 2021. A year later, the number of tickets we receive in a month has risen to 75,000. Despite this, our customer satisfaction score (CSAT) has grown from around 50 to 75 percent,” says Kakoti. “Our net promoter score (NPS) has increased from 18 to 55 percent.”

The average time it takes to respond to an email has also shrunk from 29 to 4 minutes. What’s more, the team now resolves all of its tickets, compared to 86 percent at the start of the implementation. “We also receive a wealth of positive feedback from customers on Instagram,” Kakoti adds. “We are growing rapidly but we manage to retain a lot of loyal customers, too.”

Perpetual growth

Moving forward, Plix will continue supporting its agents and improving its service. “We want to create a notification system that sets off alarms if an order is delayed,” shares Kakoti. “We also want to start managing outgoing phone calls with Zendesk and tracking and optimizing social media conversions. All of the insights we get from Zendesk are critical—a single percentage point increase in customer satisfaction metrics means a lot for our bottom line, and we plan to do everything we can to improve the journey of our users.”