Decathlon scores with streamlined customer service

To maintain its status as the world’s largest sports retailer, it’s vital that everything Decathlon does resonates and pleases its core audience of sports enthusiasts. But as its India retail operation scaled, the lack of an integrated CRM and ticketing system made it difficult to engage with customers. For a company dedicated to user happiness, living up to that promise is absolutely critical.

Decathlon India had no way of systematically organizing and responding to inbound customer service requests. As more and more streamed in via email, agents often missed questions or forgot to update the status of a conversation. While the company recognized the importance of proactively gathering customer feedback, leaders had no channel to do that, nor was there a convenient channel to monitor and reward employees. 

With Freshworks, Decathlon found a solution to all of these issues. Freshdesk integrated with Decathlon’s internal CRM system, allowing for out-of-the-box capabilities like chat, email, phone, and social media outreach. It also unified service requests and automated ticket assigning, tracking, and follow-ups, ensuring customer questions were never left unanswered. 

The company

Headquartered in France, Decathlon is the world’s largest sports retailer. In India, Decathlon operates 84 stores, serving athletes ranging from beginners to semi-professionals. 

The challenge

Due to the high volume of service requests, Decathlon struggled to efficiently document, track, and follow up with customers, often missing customer support questions entirely. The absence of standardized ticket documentation also made it difficult for one agent to pick up an interaction where another left off. And without an integrated CRM solution, any attempts to gather customer feedback via email were inefficient.

The solution

Decathlon needed a cost-effective ticketing solution that could:

• Automate workflows for customer support requests, from assigning tickets to the right agents to customer follow-up

• Provide a channel to proactively gather customer feedback

• Adapt and scale with continued growth

• Measure employee productivity

Decathlon integrated Freshdesk with its existing CRM system, which enabled streamlined customer support through chat, email, phone, and social media. By hosting its platform on AWS, Freshworks can focus its resources on developing an easy-to-use, intuitive product while leveraging a proven, reliable cloud infrastructure.

Freshdesk delivered two other significant benefits: Agents could access customer data from anywhere, and customers could find answers at their convenience through a self-service knowledge base.

Impact

Thanks to Freshdesk, Decathlon has undergone a customer service transformation. With two-way lines of communication open for both customer service requests and proactive conversations to gather feedback, customer satisfaction increased to 82% and first-call response time dropped by 30%, even as ticket volume jumped 17x.