Crate & Barrel on driving revenue through the contact center

Featuring Kate Showalter

Vice President, Customer Care and Strategic PMO at Crate&Barrel

In this Gladly podcast episode, the VP of Customer Care and Strategic PMO at Crate & Barrel, Kate Showalter, shares how COVID-19 has impacted their business and accelerated their digital transformation. She also provides insight into turning a contact center into a revenue center, plus innovation to improve service.

What happens when you, and the rest of the world, are forced to shut the doors to all your retail shops with a day's notice? According to Showalter, "when you take away what you have deemed impossible, you realize what you can really do."

"We believe that if you focus really strongly on the top three pillars, if you really focus on the customer, and the associate, and the brand, that the financial strength pillar will take care of itself."

Kate Showalter

Vice President, Customer Care and Strategic PMO, Crate&Barrel

The pandemic pushed Crate & Barrel further online. Kate says ecommerce went from about half of sales to past 70% at its peak, and she agrees that digital has become the brand's flagship store. At the time of recording, her customer service team, measured as a sales unit, sold more than any store location, and only ecommerce was larger.

That focus on sales grew out of service. After COVID-19 kept people out of stores, one associate moved a long chat to a phone call, and she and the customer spent about 28 minutes looking at wine glasses, sofas, and bedding while the customer sat on her sofa with a glass of wine. The customer bought wine glasses. The associate kept checking with her supervisor about whether it was OK to stay on the call, and the supervisor told her to keep going.

"In my tenure as the leader of CS, we've never measured handle time. I don't believe in measuring handle time."

Kate Showalter

Vice President, Customer Care and Strategic PMO, Crate&Barrel

The team does track handle time for staffing and forecasting, but it doesn't call it out to associates. Kate says the wine glass call gave the team the idea of sales as service, and selling came more naturally once associates treated it as listening to the customer and anticipating their needs.

Text messaging grew just as fast. Crate & Barrel tested SMS before the 2019 holidays, when it got about 35 texts a week, and launched it fully the following April. By the time of recording, SMS had replaced voice as the team's top channel, and overall contact volume was up about 260%. On the phone side, letting callers press one to switch to text, along with a voicemail option, cut the worst wait times from over an hour to 25 minutes right away and to 10 minutes within weeks.

Kate calls herself a shopkeeper at heart. She started at a store's front counter more than 20 years ago, and she still remembers a customer the store had helped pick out lasagna dishes for a dinner party. The next day, the customer brought Kate a lasagna in the pan, and Kate shared it with everyone in the stockroom.