Supacolor manufactures proprietary garment heat transfers (i.e. to get prints on clothes) that empower professional printers, clothing brands, crafters, and entrepreneurs to turn ideas into products. Their mission: help you make it. The company’s founders started in the garment decorating business, but they faced challenges procuring quality heat transfers — so they decided to solve the problem themselves. That foundation of understanding their customers’ business has inspired an extremely high standard for customer service. Their brand promise is to make orders supafast, supaeasy, supacolor!
Challenge
Supacolor’s customers can usually manage orders independently through their website, but for larger clients or errors with artwork, the Supacolor team steps in. Supporting customers through the order process requires multiple teams working seamlessly together. When new orders come in, the pre-production team sets up the art file for production. If there’s an issue, they hand it off to the technical customer service team to fix it with the customer. Once issues are resolved, the frontline customer service team takes over communication to provide updates and answer any other questions. Supacolor also has five international offices, which have their own processes and structure but often need to coordinate with each other for larger clients.
Supacolor initially tried to manage the complexity of their customer process through Outlook, but the team quickly hit a wall as message volume grew. They missed messages and found it difficult to stay aligned. They knew they needed a dedicated platform to design and manage their customer experience, but other solutions like Zendesk weren’t designed to handle customers across multiple teams.
Solution
Supacolor chose Front to take back control of their growing message volume, using automation customized to the needs of each team. Front also ensured every team across functions and geography could collaborate effectively in the same place to ensure a consistent customer experience. By breaking down silos across teams, they’ve established a highly efficient customer process from order to delivery that rivals the efficiency of their manufacturing process.
Designing a customer process like a manufacturing line helped save $60,000 in unnecessary production
With manufacturing, if the final product doesn’t meet customer expectations, not only is that sunk cost for the business, but it ruins customer experience. Supacolor has spent years honing their pre-production process to confirm every detail of an order. That process ensures alignment across teams internally and informs the web experience customers go through. Success in pre-production is the secret to production success.
For example, through Front, they’ve refined a system of tagging customer messages by type of artwork issue to understand what issues cause production delays or reprints for customers. At the beginning of 2023, they implemented a new tagging convention and workflows to require artwork error tags on every message in order inboxes. Within four months, they could identify a growing trend of line width issues due to unclear guidance on their website. Based on that insight, they adjusted the online experience to help clients solve the problem prior to submitting their order. That led to a 90% reduction in line width issues and saved an estimated $60,000 per year in unnecessary reprints.
“We use tagging automation extensively. It is so flexible and yet powerful because it lets us see where the pain points are across the business, where the team is seeing the biggest inefficiencies. It has been a game changer!”
-Rum Walia, Chief Operating Officer, Supacolor
Fluid collaboration across teams reduces response time by 55%
For Supacolor, a single conversation can evolve from artwork issues to pricing questions to shipment updates. Its service structure in Front enables any team to step in at any time to either respond or offer guidance. That includes international offices that need to collaborate on the same orders. Fluid coordination across teams has led to massive service improvements, including a 55% reduction in average response time over the last year and a half, from 3.6 hours down to only 1.6 hours. This is a time none of their competitors can match!
Consistent experience and flexible automation across channels leads to 96% CSAT
Supacolor has an extremely diverse customer base, which means customers can come from many channels, including email, web chat, SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Front’s ability to centralize all channels in one place across many teams and locations has allowed the business to build a consistent customer experience. They can also manage automation in one place to set up a custom set of SLA rules at different time intervals by channel and with different actions — whether to remind team members to respond, add unique tags, or alert a manager for escalation.
That consistency across channels and omnichannel automation is a major reason why Supacolor maintains a 96% CSAT score on average. Their service is a significant differentiator for their brand and has contributed to the company growing to 300 team members in less than six years to become an industry leader.
“We were using Outlook before, but we were trying to find a way for our global team to communicate while also managing the growing number of channels customers are finding to contact us. Never thought we would solve all of those problems with the same platform.”
-Rum Walia, Chief Operating Officer, Supacolor
Supacolor is continuing to invest in analytics and automation to better understand and improve their pre-production process. Their goal is to minimize the number of orders that need their team’s assistance, and Front insights have opened up many opportunities to continue driving towards that goal. The ultimate customer experience for them translates to easy artwork submission and industry-leading fast turnarounds, and if there’s a problem, they make it right. Front is a core part of making garment decoration supaeasy, supafast, supacolor!