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Michael Kors - Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2022, Click to Enter The 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service

Company: Michael Kors, New York, NY
Company Description: Michael Kors is a world-renowned, award-winning designer of luxury accessories and ready-to-wear. His namesake company, established in 1981, produces a range of products under his signature Michael Kors Collection and MICHAEL Michael Kors labels. These products include accessories, footwear, watches, jewelry, men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, eyewear and a full line of fragrance products.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: Michael Kors recovers after shut down

The MICHAEL KORS Contact Center was established in 2014 to provide real-time support to our growing customer base who shopped online via our website.

A primary goal is to support the online channel and generate sales to offset the annual Contact Center operating costs. Style Consultants (CSR's) are trained to provide product information, styling advice, accessorizing tips, and convert inquiries into sales. We use a white-glove, consultative selling approach, internally referred to as "clienteling," to create lifelong customers and loyal fans of the brand.

To ensure our Style Consultants deliver on the brand promise, we fashioned a bespoke Contact Center experience with showrooms, mannequins, and streaming music to create an energetic and immersive environment that feels like a seamless extension of the retail store experience.
Over the years, using Franklin Covey's 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) principles, the Contact Center accomplished:

  • 2017 Increased the sales conversion rate by 62% by creating and providing targeted Sales training
  • 2018 Accomplished over 200%+ Return on Cost in phone/chat sales
  • 2019 Exceeded sales goal by over 150% and Inducted 20 agents into the $100K Seller's Club

When COVID-19 struck in March 2020, we were forced to close all retail locations temporarily. With revenue severely restricted and contact volume coming in 162% to forecast by April, complex decisions had to be made.

The Challenge:

The impact of the COVID significantly affected our business, resulting in the closure of all retail stores. With limited revenue due to closures, we significantly reduced our budget.. As a result, we cut staffing, reduced hours of operation by 45%, closed the phone lines, and only offered email as a support channel for customers to reach us.

Soon the negative impact of these reductions became evident. Email response times increased from 24hrs to 15 days, and email backlog was in excess of 10K messages. Unhappy customers took to social media to complain and vent their frustrations. These complaints soon escalated to the executive leadership team

Operational Approach:

To help address the backlog, we upskilled voice agents to handle email. We also sent a "mea culpa" message to all unanswered emails apologizing for the delay and asking customers to respond only if they still needed help. If they didn't respond, we'd assume their issue was resolved. This approach reduced our +10K backlog and improved our response time from 15 days to 6 days.

Outcome:

After months of being closed, and with funding from the executive leadership, we re-opened for Black Friday – the busiest period of the retail calendar. Despite closures and setbacks, the Contact Center pivoted to a virtual service model, returned to meeting phone and email SLA's, exceeded sales goal by 11%, increased sales conversion rate by 11.4% and drove up average order value by 7.7%.

Recovering and transforming from a partial shut-down into a team that quickly pivoted to meet all KPI's is a testament to the challenges we overcame during a very challenging period.
Some of the challenges included:

  • No opportunity to generate sales
  • Significant reduction of the call center workforce
  • Reducing hours of operation by 45%
  • Closing all phone lines
  • Email backlog of 15 days
  • Increase in social media complaints

Action Plan

When we received funding to re-open, we developed a plan which included:

  • Upskilling voice Style Consultants to handle email
  • Sending "Mea Culpa" message to reduce email backlog
  • Rehiring tenured Style Consultants
  • Delivering hardware to homes while observing COVID protocols
  • Recruiting, on-boarding, and training virtual agents
  • Providing real-time support for virtual workers
  • Launching a new sales team in Nova Scotia (Canada) due to Atlanta site closure
  • Facilitating virtual sales training using hi-tech digital catalog and video training tutorials (MK Insider)
  • Implementing CTI screen-pop to reduce AHT

Operations Approach

Quickly implementing new operational procedures to recover from being (almost) completely shut down into a team that exceeded all sales and service goals.

Results

The Contact Center recovered by re-launching with virtual teams spread across two countries (the Dominican Republic and Canada). The teams performed admirably and exceeded all sales goals and SLA's.

  • Sales exceeded the target by 11%
  • Sales Conversion Rate increased by+11.4%
  • Average Order Value increased by 7.7%
  • AHT improved by 47 seconds
  • FCR improved from 88% to 90%
  • MK Insider sales training to 100% new hires

We provided a deck that supports each achievement in the entry attached as MICHAEL KORS STEVIE ENTRY #65 KPI tracking slides to quantify the performance, "Mea Culpa" email (English and French), screenshots of the digital training catalog, and examples of online sales training videos. These statistics are supplied by our BPO partner and verified internally by MICHAEL KORS.