Furlenco serves customers better by listening to data

A House of Kieraya company, Furlenco is one of the leading furniture and lifestyle brands in India. The firm was established in 2011, with flexibility and accessibility as its core offerings. Today, Furlenco provides its customers with the freedom of choice (to choose any furniture they want), access (in whatever way they want), and change (by returning or selling back).

“We’re very proud to say that we are on the path to becoming India’s largest furniture and lifestyle brand with the highest range of award-winning designs,” explains Nirupam Daniel Bose, director of customer success at Furlenco. “At the click of a button, our customers have the freedom to rent or buy new furniture with the option to sell it back when they want to change.”

To navigate this new market, Furlenco needed to understand its customers’ needs and ensure its customer service team could keep pace with the growth of the company. “We have a vision to become India’s largest furniture and lifestyle brand by 2024. Our aim is to make sure that our customers believe in our product and services, and once they do that, these customers will organically promote our brand. For this to happen, we need to have meaningful conversations with respect to their furniture needs at every stage in their life, whether they want to rent or buy,” says Bose

“Zendesk was the perfect solution to meet our requirements,” adds Bose. “We wanted to understand why our customers were contacting us, and we needed to have data sanity for our business to grow. We wanted to equip every agent with a 360-degree visibility to know and understand our customers better in order to provide the best customer experience.”

Seven years ago, the Furlenco team started working with Zendesk to unlock an omnichannel presence with emails, telephone calls, social media, and website chatbot and chat. Now upgraded to the new Zendesk suite, the team relies on features such as creating sets and specific tags to analyze data and gain a 360-degree view of the customer for data-driven decision-making. The team, having heavily invested in training sessions and certificates that Zendesk has to offer, barely required support in implementation. “All the solutions were readily customisable and available, and that made the transition so much more efficient,” recalls Bose.

Serving more customers with greater diligence

One of the most significant challenges to overcome was scalability—as the company grew, so did its customer base, requiring the team to resolve more queries. However, 85 percent of the queries through the call centre were actually generic in nature. “We figured that if we could divert these questions to an FAQ page instead, our agents could provide better support to those who had specific feedback or complaints,” says Bose. “We integrated Zendesk’s help center into our website. It was not just easily customisable, but also offered a web chat functionality to communicate with our customers. Customers are now able to search for answers more quickly without having to wait for an agent. We continue to use this solution to this day.”

Now that most of the queries are directed to the help center, the efficiency of Furlenco service agents has increased by 25 percent. “Our agents can now solve more queries, especially with the web chat feature where they can chat with multiple customers at a time,” adds Bose. Queries are also resolved much faster since agents are now able to devote more time to complex requests. “Repeated interactions from customers have decreased by 30 percent. That’s a huge improvement, and we’re proud to say that 82 percent of the tickets are now resolved with one interaction,” adds Bose. For customers, the accessibility to information and the speed of service has improved. “Our customer satisfaction score (CSAT) has risen from 40 percent to 80 percent since we started using Zendesk. This is because the agents are better equipped.”

Gaining valuable customer insights from data

Furlenco is now also empowered to gain actionable insights from interactions by dissecting data sets on customer queries. “To ensure we provide customers with all the options they want, we need a good understanding of what they are trying to tell us. The voice of the customer becomes more important, and that is where Zendesk comes into the picture,” says Bose.

Furlenco’s team has been adapting its solution based on the insights gleaned from customer interactions. “For example, initially we didn’t specify furniture measurements and our customers were specific about needing exact sizing. They also needed a larger variety of specific products and the option to purchase furniture. If we hadn’t had a tool like Zendesk, we would have missed out on these insights and we wouldn’t have implemented the changes. It is an excellent tool when you’re trying to solve customer issues. The agents are empowered,” describes Bose.

Dreaming big for the future

In the future, the team wants to rely more on artificial intelligence (AI) to automate customer service processes even further. “We now want to explore conversational AI—this is one area that hasn’t been cracked successfully, at least in India. Everybody has chatbots, but with AI, we can really converse with more people without having to overload our agents. In general, we’re talking about a different kind of customer journey, a one-stop solution. And that is where we are going to use all the potential that Zendesk has to offer, to understand what we can do next.”

“Zendesk has been on the same page with every idea that we’ve had so far. If more innovation happens in this direction, we will have excellent customer service. The dreams from here only get bigger.”