How Harry’s uses Zendesk and MaestroQA to deliver effortless customer experiences

The right razor produces a smooth shave—but, even more than that, the right razor leaves you feeling confident and ready to step out, fresh-faced, into the world. That’s the kind of experience that Harry’s wants its customers to have. The company stands for quality products at a fair price and owns everything from product design to manufacturing to shipping to customer support.

Harry’s brings the same focus on quality to their customer service. Especially now, going into the winter holidays or closing out Movember with a month-needed shave (pun intended!), Harry’s customer experience team is focused on providing timely, consistent, multichannel support.

We sat down with Alisha Sedor, customer experience manager, and Nick Martin, customer experience, quality assurance analyst to learn more about how their team delivers a great customer experience that scales.

Tell us about Harry’s.

Harry’s is a New York-based men’s grooming company founded on the belief that customers deserve great quality at a fair price. Our razor blades are engineered in Germany at our own factory, which has been manufacturing some of the world’s best blades for almost 100 years.

What makes your company so unique?

We’re one of the only vertically integrated shaving brands in the world, owning and controlling the value chain from manufacturing to point of sale to fulfillment and customer experience.

What’s your experience using Zendesk?

We’ve been with Zendesk since March 2013 and we’ve never used anything else. Our Customer Experience director had experience with Zendesk Support in her prior roles and chose Support at launch. It’s great because every customer contact that we’ve ever had is still in our Zendesk Support database, so we can go back and still look at our very first interactions! Zendesk has helped power our growth.

We use Zendesk products to manage all of our channels: We utilize Talk, Support, and Chat. We use the support analytics to communicate with the broader Harry’s team. We track every single customer contact and we take that data, turn it around, and share it with the relevant departments of the company. From new product suggestions, to web features, to advertising, we help drive changes that help us grow.

When did you start using MaestroQA?

Our quality assurance program includes grading, calibrating, and coaching. Before Maestro we used lots of Google Forms and Google Sheets for our quality assurance processes. As we started growing, we realized we needed to increase the capacity of quality assurance, but our existing setup would not scale. That’s when we decided to use MaestroQA to run our entire QA program in one solution.

What benefits have you seen since you started using MaestroQA with your Zendesk products?

We started using the Zendesk integration with MaestroQA in July of this year. The integration helps us keep track of the ticket alongside the quality coaching feedback Nick gives each agent. The integration is very efficient and has helped us save a considerable amount of time. We audit across all channels, including phone, chat, and email and have seen our email and chat audit time decrease by 50 percent.

Recovering this time back has allowed agents previously included in our QA process to focus more time on customer contacts. We’re also able to add a considerable amount of audits and quality assurance for our growing holiday workforce. Gaining time back in the QA process also allows us to develop more targeted coaching and training sessions for new and tenured agents.

What do you like best about Zendesk?

Zendesk is so user-friendly! I had never used it before working at Harry’s and I found it easy to learn. Although there are many features that you can learn to improve your processes, it’s very easy to pick up for simple customer contact. It’s an intuitive tool and it’s easy to get people up and running.