Frasers Group unifies support for 60+ retail brands

In the retail industry, providing a superior customer experience is the cornerstone of success. This was especially true for Frasers Group, a UK-based company managing a diverse portfolio of over 60 popular retail brands. To meet the demands of its diverse customers, the company needed to ensure its agents (called “customer advisors”) could efficiently handle incoming inquiries and manage a high volume of support interactions every day.

However, Frasers faced challenges due to its rapid growth through mergers and acquisitions. The company's customer support tech stack—made up of 16 siloed tools and platforms—had become complex and fragmented, making it difficult to deliver a unified customer experience. 

“Speed and self-service are paramount for our customers,” says Scott Bain, Group Head of Customer Service at Frasers. “Our job is to meet these expectations, ensuring our customers get the support they need, quickly and efficiently. Freshworks helps us do that."

Bain recognized the need to consolidate the various tools used across the organization and standardized on Freshworks' customer service solutions, including Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller. These tools enable Frasers to automate self-service while simplifying operations in a scalable way for the future. By integrating these systems and leveraging shared data, Frasers has enhanced its customer service capabilities, saved money, and positioned itself for continued growth and success.

The company

Frasers Group is a FTSE 250 company headquartered in the UK. Operating over 60 fashion and luxury brands (including Sports Direct, Flannels, and House of Fraser), the retail group employs over 25,000 people and has 700+ stores across 25 countries.

The challenge

After years of acquiring and merging with smaller retail brands, Frasers Group faced a frustrating dilemma: the organization had 16 different tools for delivering customer support—all operating independently and requiring separate contracts. This had an impact on agents’ productivity as they switched between screens, leading to slower responses and unhappy customers.

Frasers' goal was to fix this by implementing a single omnichannel solution for self-service, conversational support, and ticketing. In addition to improving the customer experience, Frasers also wanted a platform that would enable its customer advisors to focus on crafting genuine customer relationships—rather than handling tedious tasks.

Bain wanted a solution that not only met his technical requirements, but also a vendor that could act as a trusted partner. In Freshworks, Bain found what he was looking for: an omnichannel customer service solution that could help unify support for more than 60 brands—and a vendor that upheld the same high customer service standards as Frasers.

The solution

Bain and his team implemented Freshworks’ omnichannel customer service software, consisting of Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller. With Freshchat's AI-driven chatbots and Freshdesk's advanced ticketing and collaboration features, Frasers is able to provide exceptional customer support across its dozens of retail brands. 

When customers need support, they can go to any brand’s website, click “Contact Us,” and get support through varying channels such as—email, phone, social media, chat, or WhatsApp. With a centralized, self-service knowledge base, customers can also dynamically access helpful resources when they need them.

AI-driven chatbots help customers self-serve and deflect common questions from agents, so they can focus on white-glove customer service. Behind the scenes, advanced ticketing helps automatically route tickets to the agents most skilled to handle them and allows for seamless collaboration on tickets with other team members and departments, resulting in quicker customer responses and happier customers. Freddy Copilot’s automatic ticket summarizer—which generates a synopsis of a ticket based on all the replies made up until that point—saves significant time for agents.

With Freshworks’ simple integrations, Bain and his team can quickly implement and configure Freshworks for a new brand in a matter of days—an essential capability given the company’s acquisition growth strategy.

Impact

With Freshworks’ customer service solutions, Frasers has achieved over 1 in 4 deflection rate—and a simultaneous, marked increase in customer satisfaction. Freshworks’ chatbots have particularly benefited Frasers’ luxury brands, helping them achieve an impressive average response time of less than 60 seconds.

Frasers’ customers are thrilled with the quality and accessibility of the new self-service support options, while advisors find the Freshworks platform intuitive and user-friendly. In all, Freshworks products have led to a savings of almost 20,000 hours annually in manual work time for Frasers' advisors.

On top of improving the customer experience and agent satisfaction, Bain has identified another advantage: Moving away from 16 different systems and standardizing on Freshworks has resulted in significant cost savings.

For Frasers Group, success doesn’t stop here. Bain’s team is currently exploring ways to leverage Freshworks’ advanced AI capabilities and Microsoft Teams integration to drive productivity further. “We love using Freshworks because it’s intuitive, easy to use, and pulls all the pieces together,” says Bain. “We’re very happy with the value we've seen from Freshworks’ customer service solutions.”

Frasers Group’s long-term vision goes beyond exceptional customer support—it’s about using AI and data to transform how our customers engage with retail. With Freshworks, the team is laying the foundation for scalable, intelligent service that complements their larger digital elevation programme, such as personalised customer journeys, AI-powered operations, and retail media innovation across its brand portfolio.