PacSun Resolves 85% of Customer Inquiries with Virtual Agents.

Pacific Sunwear of California, LLC, more commonly known as PacSun, is an American retail clothing brand that offers lifestyle apparel, along with footwear and accessories, to teens and young adults.

Problem

The popularity of online shopping in recent years is great for business, but tough for support teams. PacSun’s call centers were experiencing a flood of outreach from consumers, ranging from basic product questions to post-purchase order support.

PacSun’s support agents were soon overwhelmed by the increasing volume, which resulted in long wait times for issue resolution and low customer satisfaction.

But PacSun wanted to meet their customers’ growing expectations and provide an unparalleled customer experience as well as forward-thinking fashion. So they turned to Capacity.

“We partnered with Capacity because of their ability to provide quick and easily accessible customer communications and drive engagement with our shoppers after a purchase, as well as automate basic tasks to lessen the burden on our customer service agents.” – Doug Pearce, Sr. Manager of Ecommerce and Customer Service

Solution

The goal was simple: to streamline the shopping experience and make it easier for PacSun customers to get the help they need immediately, without relying on an agent.

First, PacSun and Capacity’s Customer Success team worked closely together to identify the most noticeable bottlenecks and barriers within PacSun’s existing CX strategy. 

Using a combination of web chat and SMS Virtual Agents, PacSun empowers their customers to resolve their own inquiries themselves. Customers can ask the Virtual Agent to modify or return an order, find their nearest store location, report a missing item, and more.

Plus, proactive, personalized recommendations guide customers to products they might be interested in as they shop. After purchase, SMS notifications keep customers informed on order statuses, shipping, and returns.

If an inquiry is escalated to a live agent, the Virtual Agent first collects relevant information and context.

Results

“Seeing the power of automation and the benefits of real-time insights, PacSun’s team has formed a close partnership with the Capacity Customer Success team to develop quarterly plans on undertaking the next use case sets that can continue to move the needle on customer satisfaction and revenue.” – Shirley Gao, Chief Information Officer

Since implementing Capacity’s Virtual Agents, PacSun has streamlined their customer support process and boosted their customer experience, resulting in:

• 85% of all customer inquiries handled by Virtual Agents
• 33% of shoppers opt-in to SMS notifications
• 19% conversion rate for personalized purchase recommendations

Previously, over 50% of PacSun’s customer chat interactions occurred outside of working hours. Now, since Virtual Agents work 24/7, customers are never left hanging. Plus, PacSun is able to scale their CX strategy up or down as demand fluctuates. 

As a result, PacSun’s live agents can focus on inquiries which require more human attention. Since any escalated issue automatically includes customer context, first-contact resolution and time-to-resolution rates have significantly improved along with customer experience.

Finally, robust analytics help PacSun team learn from user intent, sentiment, resolution effectiveness, and more in real-time. PacSun can make data-led decisions on how to optimize service and provide teams with actionable feedback.

All in all, Capacity’s Virtual Agents have helped PacSun boost customer satisfaction while reducing call volume.

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