Armedangels

The Situation

ARMEDANGELS is disrupting the fashion industry with its mission to make clothing more ethical and environmentally-friendly. Growing their brand internationally, ARMEDANGELS is always looking for new sustainable ways to support them and their customers. For their service department, this endeavor led to automating their most repetitive requests with MAATE, their chatbot.

Since their founding in 2007 by two friends who had the idea of launching a Fairtrade certified eco fashion label, ARMEDANGELS has been on a steep success curve while challenging the fast fashion industry from their headquarters in Cologne. 

Besides their own web shop, ARMEDANGELS’ products are also available in over 900 stationary stores and marketplaces (such as Zalando) in sixteen countries across Europe.The company currently has 115 employees and their customer service team consists of 7 agents.

With sustainability at its very core, ARMEDANGELS searches for digital solutions which support their growth long-term, expecting even more customers and more orders in the near future. Their goal is to be able to actually decrease the ratio of service tickets and orders to relieve their service department while increasing their sales. 

The Challenge

In the past, their seven service agents were often overwhelmed by the sheer number of repetitive requests about orders, but also pre-sales topics which caused struggles in maintaining the high service quality. As their customer base is very sustainability-conscious, many questions arise before the actual order to avoid buying the wrong size and having to return it. ARMEDANGELS wants to ensure that their customers are offered quick and high-quality support at every stage of their buying journey.

ARMEDANGELS was challenged by the high number of repetitive requests, filling up their backlog, while maintaining a high service quality.

The Solution

Paving the way for a new era of consumer behavior, ARMEDANGELS decided to make automation a priority for their customers and their service department. Aiming to grow even more internationally, ARMEDANGELS did not want to simply add more headcount to their service team, but support their growth with automation. They wanted to empower their customers and enable them to solve requests on their own with a chatbot solution which caters to their needs 24/7, pre- and post-sales. 

In February 2021, their chatbot MAATE, which was named collaboratively in an internal survey, was implemented across every page of their website, serving all of their webshop’s customers. It was a fast turnaround since the bot was launched just one and a half weeks after the onboarding with Dixa’s chatbot customer success team. 

Self-services gives agents back time they need to focus on quality service

MAATE soon became an important and indispensable addition to the team by taking over around 2,500 conversations every month, supporting and relieving its human colleagues immensely. Within just two months, ARMEDANGELS was able to have the chatbot handle 30% of their overall ticket volume and reduce the first reply time by 20%. 

The chatbot was well accepted by their customers right from the start, being able to achieve a self-service rate of 87% while delivering a CSAT of 74%. MAATE is integrated with ARMEDANGELS’ CRM system Zendesk and in case a request needs to be handled by a human agent, it can handover the conversation via email, phone and live chat. By adding Dixa’s chatbot Function, the bot is able to track and inform customers about order and shipment statuses. 

Using customer service data to continuously improve the service experience

On top of offering quick reliable solutions to their customers and taking away the backlog of repetitive requests for their service agents, MAATE helps ARMEDANGELS to understand their customers and their needs even better – and act on it. The gathered data and insights from conversations and feedback helps the service team to identify service and knowledge gaps, which customers frequently encounter, and they’re then able to prioritize these topics internally, enhancing the customer experience continuously. 

ARMEDANGELS uses the chatbot to understand their customer needs better and prioritizes internal projects accordingly based on these insights.

Now that ARMEDANGELS has seen great initial success with MAATE, their support team is keen on further improving the chatbot for an even better service experience. Making the chatbot available on the whole website was just the beginning, now it’s about optimizing the usage of the chatbot and the user experience for their customers in even more detail. This will be achieved through more dynamic and most importantly more personalized content, which enables their customers to solve even more requests on their own.