Thrasio automates QA and enhances its CX with Tethr

Thrasio is the next-generation consumer goods company reimagining how the world's most-loved online marketplace products become accessible to everyone. Since 2018, it has grown more than 200 brands and estimates that one in six U.S. households has purchased a Thrasio product. Thrasio has invested heavily in its customer experience. The customer obsession team provides 24/7 support and resolves over 70,000 tickets per month, earning Thrasio a CSAT score in the top 10% of all industries.

One of Thrasio’s leadership principles is “good isn’t good enough,” and the company is constantly striving to elevate its customer experience. Recognizing that its manual QA process was limiting the business to learning from only a small percentage of customer interactions, it committed to automating the process so they could analyze 100% of interactions–which led it to conversation intelligence platform Tethr.

Streamlining the QA process

With thousands of phone calls and other customer interactions coming in every week, Thrasio’s team of CX analysts was only able to manually audit about 3% of interactions–and they estimated it would have taken a team of 528 analysts to manually review 100%. 

In addition to being time-consuming, the manual QA process was subjective. Analysts completed a QA checklist for every interaction they reviewed, but different analysts could interpret the same phrases or behaviors in different ways. This made it difficult to provide unbiased coaching to its customer obsession representatives.

By implementing Tethr, Thrasio was able to start objectively auditing 100% of interactions across every customer service channel and surface insights in a CX dashboard. These insights have allowed their services team to improve the agent coaching experience by eliminating bias–agents receive data-backed feedback based on all their interactions. 

Thrasio has also dramatically decreased the time its CX analyst team spends manually auditing interactions. “Instead of spending time listening to calls, reading emails, or evaluating each interaction, we’re able to use our CX dashboard,” says Joyce Gimeno, CX Analyst at Thrasio. “It makes our analysis more efficient and allows us to focus on improving the most important areas of our customer experience.”

The CX analyst team is now saving approximately $260,000 per year, thanks to its increased efficiency with Tethr.

Uncovering and acting on product insights

Thrasio is also using Tethr to uncover product issues and insights based on customer service phone calls, chat conversations, emails, Amazon reviews, and negative customer experience data sources. It has configured 1,000 categories–collections of phrases that describe a specific concept or behavior–to track issues across all tickets and brands, allowing team members assigned to each brand to identify and address new issues quickly.

“Not only is Tethr flagging known issues to help us measure the impact, but it can also identify new issues that we don’t know about, and that is powerful,” says Miranda Grigar, Customer Obsession Manager. “Tethr tells us what we don’t already know, and that’s key because my team can’t be in every single ticket.”

According to Erika Tagami-Manahan, Global Services, Customer Experience Lead, it could be a lengthy manual process to identify a new product issue before Tethr. “Now, we are able to streamline our process by auditing only around 200-300 tickets to identify issues,” she says. “And then, once we build new categories to track those issues in Tethr, quantifying them becomes easier and more efficient.” Thanks to Tethr, the Global Services team can efficiently uncover and address product issues without incurring unnecessary, labor-intense processes–ultimately ensuring they are delivering positive brand experiences to their customers. 

Combating fraud

One unexpected win Thrasio has had with Tethr is in combating fraudulent buyer messages. By building categories based on the specific language it has found in these messages, it has developed a fraud report that allows it to flag messages that might have bypassed a generic fraud filter. When it gets a new fraud hit, Tethr automatically triggers an email to relevant team members to ensure they respond to the issue immediately.

The fraud report also helped Thrasio make informed policy changes to mitigate the risk of future fraudulent interactions. Since implementing these stricter policies, the business has seen a dramatic decrease in the overall number of fraudulent interaction attempts and have identified over $3800 that would have otherwise been refunded in fraudulent customer interactions. “We believe that bad actors previously targeting us have greatly reduced their efforts after seeing their attempts have been unsuccessful,” says Grigar. 

Thrasio puts the customer first with Tethr

Thrasio’s customer experience is best in class, and its CSAT score is consistently between 89-91 (the industry average is 78). However, rather than be content with where it is, the company is continuously working to improve its customer experience.

“We don’t want to be compared to anyone else. We want our level of support to be something you can’t compete with,” says Gershwin Exeter, Vice President of Global Services. “Tethr is helping us get there by finding these hidden gem insights and having us actively address them so we can drive an exceptional customer experience.”

Thrasio continues to identify new ways to streamline its operations and improve its customer service with Tethr; one current project involves automating its disposition process to eliminate agent subjectivity and provide more nuance (when a customer submits a ticket discussing multiple issues, for example). As the business expands on the ways it is using Tethr, it continues to keep the voice of the customer at the forefront of its strategy, helping it build loyalty and grow its brands.