When Plexus Worldwide revamped their customer support site, they set some lofty goals. With a customer-first mindset, they focused on creating new communication channels for customers to access when they needed help. A mobile-first, self-serve approach was top of mind.
Louis decided that online forms would be a perfect solution for getting customers the assistance they need quickly and easily, around-the-clock. By embedding an array of Formstack forms within their customer support site, Plexus gave customers a way to receive responses within 30 minutes of submission. From product refunds to customer suggestions, more than 50 forms have been used over the years to easily manage many of Plexus’s customer support duties.
It has reduced the stress of our leadership team because there's this forms processing team 24/7, just humming along, handling where is my order forms, or reship request forms. They've got that team supporting them 24/7.
Tell us about yourself!
I'm Louis Ross. And I am the Vice President of Customer Service for Plexus Worldwide. And we are an international provider of nutritional supplement products.
What were the challenges before using Formstack?
Email has been around for a long time in customer service. And it's actually one of the lowest FCR, or First Contact Resolution, channels there is, because consumers will email the company, hey, where's my order? But they won't use the email address that's associated with the account. Now the customer service representative has to email them. Well, which account? What's your account number or your email? And there's a conversation going on there. And that costs time, and money, and frustration for the consumer.
With Formstack, by having a easy-to-use, mobile-friendly form, the consumer can simply enter, or you can pre-populate a lot of times, the required information. Now the agent has what they need. They can reply simply.
How have you reimagined work using Formstack?
When we launched the forms using Formstack within the Help Center-- and, again, we set goals of if we could shift 10% of our contacts to these forms via Formstack, we were going to be satisfied within one year. At about the six-month mark, it quickly grew to over 25% of our contacts are now coming in via Formstack forms.
What outcomes has Formstack helped you achieve?
I have 242 agents on my entire worldwide roster. And I'm able to commit a portion of those agents to these forms. And that allows our higher-skilled, more experienced voice and chat agents to focus on those channels.
What advice would you give to someone looking to become “practically genius”?
So I call it working smart, right? Consumers want service in different ways. Some will call. Some will use chat. A lot of people these days want to go online on their phone and self-serve. And so you have to have great knowledge management. You need a robust, dynamic, constantly-being-updated library of information about your products and service.
And when you do that-- and you can measure it, you can see what articles are being viewed in that-- then the next level of working smart, and hopefully being a genius, is embedding Formstack forms within those articles for additional information or for account-specific information. Here's a simple form. Complete these three fields, and we'll reply back within 30 minutes an answer to your question.
Once you start to reply quickly to forms that are submitted, your consumers learn that you're the type of company that replies to those forms, and you gain their trust. And you can move a portion of your contacts to that Help Center and form channel, which a lot of consumers really appreciate these days, because it's a 24/7 world. They're not always expecting you to answer the phone. But they are expecting service 24/7. And with Formstack forms, you can be a genius and make that happen.
Would you recommend Formstack to a friend?
I would definitely recommend Formstack forms to anybody who's interested in working smart. There's so many ways you can use Formstack forms to work smart and get the job done.
