Thrasio sees response times drop by 80 hours with Zendesk

Ecommerce leader Thrasio has been helping entrepreneurs around the world build amazing Amazon businesses since 2018. It’s all part of the company’s mission to reimagine how the most-loved products become accessible to everyone. Today, Thrasio sells thousands of products in many verticals across Amazon’s global marketplaces and has a tremendous global reach with direct-to-consumer sites, as well as brick and mortar retail.

In 2022, Thrasio’s Vice President of Global Services, Gershwin Exeter, teamed up with fellow leaders at the company to relaunch Zendesk for customer experience (CX). After partnering with Zendesk professional services on that implementation, Thrasio returned the following year and rolled out Zendesk to improve the employee experience (EX) and gain efficiencies for the Listing Support team.

“This project was aimed at supporting our employees who support our customers,” explains Exeter. In particular, Thrasio’s Listing Support team supports Category Management in managing Amazon listings, legal and compliance issues, brand operations, and account health issues.

A Listing Support milestone

Mairead Blue, Director of Support Experience at Thrasio, manages the Listing Support team along with the Project Management, Insights, and Platforms teams. She saw the new EX project for Listing Support as a milestone in the company’s long-term strategy.

“Zendesk is already known for its CX work and performance, so we wanted to show how it can be extrapolated and brought to other Thrasio teams over time,” says Blue. “Our team is smaller, with different processes and challenges. But Zendesk was able to step up, listen to our needs, and adapt the platform so we can run more efficiently and smoothly.”

One foundational element associated with each Listing Support task is the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN), a unique ten-digit alphanumeric code assigned to every new product created and sold on Amazon. There’s a wealth of information associated with each ASIN, including brand name, account name, Category Manager, product type, and certifications.

One problem with a single ASIN can potentially affect the entire brand, or on a larger scale the whole account. Brand or account issues can lead to large-scale shipping and inventory delays. For this reason, the Listing Support team closely monitors product listings, and triages brand and account concerns, for all of Thrasio’s 14,000 ASINs.

In addition to Listing Support’s proactive work, the team also engages in immediate reactive remedies. Listing Support responds to direct requests from Amazon regarding product legal and compliance issues, reports about alleged non-compliant products, inventory issues, suspended ASINs, and account health concerns. On a daily basis, Listing Support assists Thrasio Category Managers who want to update their Amazon listings to reflect product upgrades or variations.

“My team’s role is to respond and make sure suspensions and suppressions are lifted, warnings are received and addressed, and inventory issues are taken care of,” shares Blue. “And if there are any other alleged violations of Amazon’s Terms of Use we act immediately to get ASINs reinstated and ensure the account doesn’t go down.”

Streamlining support for 190 brands

Adding Listing Support ticketing and workflows to Thrasio’s existing Zendesk instance has been transformative for the team. “Before using Zendesk for Listing Support, the workflow to resolve those issues was manual. It is now automated and seamless,” says Exeter.

That’s a major victory, considering Amazon processes are built more for individual sellers, not for large aggregators like Thrasio with 190 brands. Amazon’s frequent rule changes add another layer of difficulty, but Zendesk helps the team persevere.

All incoming tickets are now routed through Zendesk and tagged as Priority One, Two, Three, or Four based on the ASIN and type of Amazon or Category Manager notification. Thrasio does skill-based routing, and assigns certain service levels based on priority. It’s now a streamlined support process from start to finish.

289% higher efficiency and happier employees

To keep information flowing quickly across the company, Thrasio set up automations in Zendesk that connect to a custom application, which Zendesk custom built for the company. The application is a game changer when it comes to updating ASIN accounts.

“We can search using the app, which is user-friendly and pulls up all the details. That allows us to have fewer communications with other internal partners, and everyone gets answers faster,” says Blue. “The Category Managers want to focus on their job, not ASIN details, so they are happier partners now.”

A centralized knowledge base enables employees to self-serve more efficiently. “Zendesk helped us create a repository of all this documentation so that Listing Support specialists no longer need to go to Legal with questions,” Blue says. “We can use Zendesk automation to respond to suspensions and warnings quickly. That’s empowered us to operate as a fully functioning, full-service team.”

Response times have dramatically improved, too. “With our new automations, a specialist can locate and produce a certification in two minutes on the Zendesk platform,” reports Blue. “They don’t have to navigate anywhere else, speak to Legal, or contact the Supply Chain team for the answer.” Calculations on the time saved from those additional interactions decreased response times from 97.5 hours to 1.7 hours.

In addition, setting up Zendesk automations, macros, and using the custom app has helped the Listing Support team increase overall efficiency by an impressive 289 percent. The team is much more efficient, and happier. Employee satisfaction rates quickly climbed from 71 percent to 79 percent.

Hello automations, goodbye manual tasks

Workflows in the Amazon tool, Seller Central, were optimized as well. “Prior to Zendesk, we had to log into separate Seller Central accounts for all 190 brands and manually enter the new wording, listing title, or price. Then log out, refresh, confirm the change, and respond to the Category Manager,” says Exeter. “The team spent more time logging in and out of systems than they did actually making updates.”

Today, the team can work smarter and faster since integrating Zendesk with the PIM (Product Information Management) tool, a large product catalog that helps track and manage listing changes. “When a listing needs to be updated, it all happens immediately. Listing Support never has to go into Seller Central. All of the manual entry is taken care of because PIM combined with Zendesk revises the listing automatically,” adds Blue.

Thrasio can even track product search and shopping cart activity to get a sense of how revenue or cost savings might be affected by a suspension, suppression, or warning from Amazon. Ideally, the team can use these insights to prevent such issues from happening altogether.

Expert guidance on change management

Exeter values having an open feedback loop to discuss challenges and possible solutions, so it was a natural decision for Thrasio to engage with Zendesk professional services again.

“We documented our strategy. We reorganized our team. We reimagined our processes. We improved our insights. We changed our technology. We only configured Zendesk. We did not customize anything! We changed to an automation-based culture. This resulted in a beautiful, employee-centric mindset of our people,” Exeter says. “Zendesk professional services knows their technology and we helped them understand our strategy, processes, and other elements to jointly build the solution.”

“Once the professional services team got on board, we were able to drive forward and that upfront investment made the latter part go very smoothly. Just by using Zendesk, we automated 62 percent of the tickets coming in,” comments Exeter.

Going all in on AI

In the fourth quarter of 2023, all of Thrasio’s Global Services employees went through a formal 26-hour learning plan on AI automation. “We’re infusing AI and automation into every single thing that is happening within this team, so we can start to get predictive with our behavior,” says Exeter.

Thrasio’s relationship with Zendesk will be a crucial part of that vision. “We are working with Zendesk to create a customer and employee experience that is top of the charts. And wrapping that all together so it’s seamless and our people spend more time thinking than doing. If we can do that, we’ve won.”