How Tecovas took the frustration out of calling support

Tecovas is a direct-to-consumer western boots and accessories brand built on handmade quality products and incredible service — which means they want to make sure their customer support team is the best it can be. Since the company first launched in 2015, Tecovas heavily invested in customer experience to deliver fast, efficient, and hyper-personalized support at scale.

But as demand grew, their existing support solutions couldn’t keep up. This frustrated both customers and agents, which anyone will tell you is no good for business. Their help desk solution didn’t offer a unified view of all customer interactions—this led to siloed conversations, which meant if a customer sent multiple inquiries, they might have different agents responding to them.

(If you’ve ever had to provide the same information over and over just to speak with someone on the phone, you know exactly how frustrating that can be.)

The struggle: High support costs and inconsistent service

Given how Tecovas’ clients prefer to speak with a live agent, phone calls made up half of the support volume. But the existing contact center solution’s poor call quality and frequent outages were taking a toll on customer (and agent) satisfaction.

This motivated the team at Tecovas to look for new solutions that would allow them to better organize customer data, reduce agent collision, and provide seamless voice support.

They found not one, but two solutions, that were perfectly integrated to help solve their problems.

Data + voice + a great integration = Happy customers

Switching to Kustomer (a customer service-focused CRM platform that provides a unified customer view) and Dialpad’s Kustomer integration transformed Tecovas’ customer and agent experience from day one.

How? Well, by merging together customer contact information, Shopify orders, exchanges, and cross-channel conversations, Kustomer gave agents the full customer context they needed to deliver an efficient but still personalized customer experience.

And since voice is the channel of choice for Tecovas’ customers, Dialpad’s high-quality and reliable cloud contact center solution came in clutch.

Voice is, after all, still an important way to build rapport between agents and customers. When a customer needs styling and sizing recommendations alongside their day-to-day transactional support, voice is the way to go.

“With our previous contact center solution, you could only hear every other word that a customer was saying,” said Carli, Head of Customer Success at Tecovas. “The customer would have to call back, and the agent would be unable to offer assistance despite being there to help."

Tecovas stores key contacts in Dialpad, such as their FedEx partner and retail stores, so agents no longer have to manually search phone numbers on Google. In fact, Tecovas used Dialpad to support all of their store openings, and agents can easily transfer calls and contact store managers.

“With Kustomer and Dialpad, you’re always on the same page as your customers—as well as your agents,” said Carli.

Making it easier for agents to upsell

Thanks to Kustomer and Dialpad, Tecovas was able to make sure customer data was always organized and up-to-date. This created room for new upsell opportunities and ways to reward long-time brand advocates—not to mention saving the agents the headache of sorting through disorganized data.

For instance, when speaking with a customer through Dialpad's embedded CTI dialer in Kustomer, an agent can see the customer’s past Shopify orders in there too, right in the same window.

The agent can then recommend similar products and accessories and inform the customer about new releases they may be interested in (think of it like personalized recommendations that don’t require snooping on anyone’s web search history).

Agents can also identify VIPs based on the customer’s average order size and lifetime value to really personalize service—because there’s nothing that ensures top service quite like spending a lot of money:

In addition to improving the customer experience, the Kustomer + Dialpad integration allowed Tecovas to reimagine agent onboarding and training. Immediately upon switching, Carli got positive feedback from the team on how intuitive and easy to use both platforms are.

Now, training on Kustomer and Dialpad takes less than a day, freeing up agents’ time to focus on learning the team’s workflows.

Every Dialpad call is recorded and added to the customer’s profile within Kustomer, which makes communication a lot easier. If an agent is new to taking calls, their team lead can listen in on live calls and message them with answers in real-time if needed. Feedback flows naturally, without the need to set up a formal one-on-one meeting.

What’s next

Within the next six months, Tecovas will double their support staff and grow to 70 agents. One of Tecovas’ plans is to leverage Kustomer’s intelligent routing to automatically route email conversations by topic and level of difficulty.

Going beyond round-robin assignment will make sure that each agent has a steady flow of work based on their level and area of expertise.

Carli is excited to use Dialpad’s RTA (Real-Time Assist) cards, which display pop-up suggestions to agents during calls based on trigger keywords and phrases, which will help agents relay accurate information consistently:

She’s also looking to set up CSAT surveys at the end of calls to automate feedback collection and optimize support.

Finally, to continue building a support organization agents are happy to be a part of, Carli will reinforce the existing compensation structure and create a career path for agents within the organization.

“We want to recognize people’s strengths and reward them for putting in the time and effort to continue learning,” Carli said. “Kustomer and Dialpad make that easier, and I look forward to continuing our partnership as we grow.”