Fixami – better known as Gereedschapcentrum.nl – is a successful and fast-growing e-commerce player with customers in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain. A few years ago, the company still had all the characteristics of a startup: with a basic website, an order system, outlook and a telephone exchange. We are now working hard on further expanding the CX and customer contact strategy.

 

The start-up nature of Gereedschapcentrum.nl was until recently also visible in customer service technology. The company could be reached through multiple contact channels, but these were managed separately. Nicole Verspeek, Customer Service Engineer at Fixami, looks back: “There was a hunt group to answer the calls – which for a long time was sufficient for the slightly more than ten customer contact employees. There was a separate WhatsApp Business account for handling WhatsApp messages. And all emails ended up in Outlook, where they were manually categorized and distributed. This often led to cherry picking, which in turn resulted in complex or old issues being left behind instead of being given priority.”

“Another consequence was that little management information was available about efficiency, quality, accessibility and about who does what,” says colleague Melissa Fox, Customer Service Team Lead.

Challenges: Growing Fixami

Fixami has expanded its activities to Belgium (2016), France and Spain (2019) and Germany (2021) in a relatively short period of time. This mainly means thousands of e-mails per day, from customers via the web forms on the various websites. Verspeek explains: “Not only has the number of orders increased, French and Spanish customers are also arriving earlier and more often. More questions are simply asked per order. This also has to do with logistics. A shipment from the Netherlands to France or Spain is more complex and takes more time. Customers want more frequent updates.”

In short, Fixami had to implement considerable professionalisation, also in order to steer further growth in the right direction. Shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, it was therefore decided to invest in a full-fledged, cloud-based customer contact platform – Genesys Cloud 3. This ensures that all calls, e-mails, chats and WhatsApp messages can be handled from one omnichannel platform. With that, Fixami was also ready in time to allow customer service employees to work from home when the company was affected by the corona pandemic like everyone else. For Fixami, this meant even more work, because many consumers started working on their homes instead of going on holiday.

“Email is an important channel for our customers”

“Our customers – mainly professionals and semi-professionals from different countries – communicate a lot and often via the web form on the websites. E-mail is therefore an important channel for us, with a considerable volume of about 14.000 e-mails per week. Our goal is to provide our customers with a response within 1 working day,” says Verspeek. “With the introduction of Genesys, we were able to address many basic issues. Genesys ensures that the emails end up in different queues for languages, departments and priorities, so that the handling is done in the right order and by the right employee. This also puts an end to cherry picking and both the workload and the priorities are fully transparent.”

Email is also a laborious channel

But looking up a related series of emails within a queue remained difficult. Vos explains: “An answered e-mail 'disappears' from Genesys, while additional follow-up actions are often necessary afterwards, for example because a customer calls about it or sends an app or follow-up actions are needed towards different people or departments.”

For this, Fixami has implemented a solution from Frontline Solutions, Front Line Mail Manager, in addition to Genesys Cloud. “With this, an employee is not only offered relevant e-mails from customers to process (the push function), but specific e-mail messages within an e-mail thread can also be searched for (the pull function),” explains Verspeek . “The latter saves the back office, where returns are handled, for example, a lot of time: the associated e-mail can easily be looked up.”

Self-reliance

“Our sales team also uses the pull app to contact suppliers and can look up the right mail within a thread. Think of companies that place purchase orders or want to buy on account and communicate about this,” says Vos.

The Fixami customer service team can add e-mail addresses to Mail Manager themselves and then define a flow in Genesys with which the e-mails are recognized and routed. This is relevant because Fixami has the ambition to expand its activities to more countries within Europe.

Next step in professional customer service

With the interventions in the approach to email traffic, both customer service, sales and the back office have regained control and have clear management information at their disposal. This enables the departments to better manage results, which is also noticeable for Fixami customers.

Verspeek: “The response time for e-mails addressed to customer service is now a maximum of 1 working day. Previously, this could take up to 5 working days, depending on the queue. Mail manager sends clear signals, filters spam and speeds up the handling process.” In addition, customers ask fewer questions about e-mails, which has also improved the telephony service level: previously this was 80% within 6 minutes, which was not always achieved, and now this is 70% within 30 seconds.

Verspeek expects that these improvements will also be reflected in the customer satisfaction survey that is planned.

Do as much as possible yourself

Fixami's customer service team is now playing chess on two boards at once. On the one hand, we are working hard to formulate a solid customer contact strategy, including a roadmap for the technology. On the other hand, the team is also working hard to make the processes more efficient and customer-friendly. “We are improving the customer journey with the systems we now have in-house,” says Vos. “In addition, we want to do as much as possible ourselves in order to be able to respond to changes as quickly as possible and to be less dependent on IT specialists.”

Among other things, the team wants to work with customer recognition, so that customers seeking contact can be optimally routed. “One of the most important objectives for the coming period is to increase the percentage of first time fixes. We like to do things right, but they also have to go right the first time.”

About Fixami and Gereedschapcentrum.nl – The origin of Gereedschapcentrum.nl dates back to 2007, when founders Luuk Schormans and Bram Mutsaers started offering (second hand) tools via Marktplaats. In September 2009 Gereedschapcentrum.nl was launched. In 2016, the company became active in Belgium with Fixami.be. The name Fixami – the name of the parent company – is based on the French word 'handy buddy'. In the same year, the company won a Gouden Gazelle in the FD Gazellen Awards as the fastest growing (medium-sized) company in the South of the Netherlands. In 2019, the company reached #75 in the Twinkle100 and a year later, investor Foreman Capital came on board. Fixami now employs 250 people and the company has a turnover of approximately 100 million euros. Fixami serves its customers with 30 customer contact specialists in four languages ​​from the contact center in Tilburg. Of Front Line Mail Manager an average of 14.000 e-mails are handled every week.

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

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