Leading the Charge in Customer Service Transformation: The ASOS Story with Daryl Wilkes

Get ready to enter the fast-paced world of e-commerce retail with our guest, Daryl Wilkes, Director of Customer Care at ASOS. 

His hands-on experience with leading customer service transformation programmes across multiple industries gives him a unique perspective on how to navigate the ever-changing digital landscape. As he takes us through the customer experience at ASOS, we understand how digital natives desire quick, self-resolved interactions and the efforts ASOS is making to ensure a seamless customer journey.

We also delve into the massive change in ASOS's customer service approach. Hear how the simple shift from social and email channels to primarily using live chat led to a remarkable improvement in the customer experience and resolution rate. It's a testament to the advantages of a digital-native customer service approach.

Daryl also reflects on his career progression, his passion for service operations, and the importance of maintaining a close connection with customers for success. 

Beyond the work, Daryl offers fascinating insights into overcoming challenges in the retail industry - highlighting the courage it takes to face them head-on. He shares his personal journey of overcoming imposter syndrome, the value of risk-taking, and the joy of running and participating in charity football matches. 

As he talks about managing a demanding schedule with his family's involvement in football, we get a glimpse of the human side of a leader in the e-commerce industry.

Tune in to this engaging episode for a mix of professional insights and personal anecdotes from an industry leader.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Yeah, welcome to CX Diaries. Cx Diaries from the Customer Experience Foundation is our podcast where we talk to the people at the sharp end of CX and Contact Centres, the movers and the shakers, the innovators, the disruptors and the people delivering in the real world who share their personal stories of their journey through our industry. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Darrell Wilkes.

Speaker 1: 0:54

Darrell is the director of Customer Care at ASOS, the global e-commerce fashion retailer that operates from over 200 countries across the globe. Darrell has spent the majority of his career in customer service and operation space and led a number of major customer service and transformation programs across multiple industries, including retail, e-commerce, telecoms and financial services. Darrell is now in his third year at ASOS and he's played a major role in the transformation of ASOS customer care, including building a digital care function, such as delivering a new channel strategy and helping involve the customer care function to a fully live operation for the ASOS customer. Darrell and his team are also responsible for ASOS health strategy, ensuring ASOS are there for every customer when they need help, support, problem resolution and a whole lot more. Darrell, welcome, glad, you're happy with us today.

Speaker 2: 1:46

Thanks, keith. Really appreciate you inviting me on, looking forward to it.

Speaker 1: 1:49

So you've been at ASOS three years now. Tell us about the role and how it's gone.

Speaker 2: 1:55

So I started this role in January actually, and so I was very humbled to be promoting into the director role in January this year and it's going great. Listen, it's obviously tough in the retail environment at the moment, so I've almost kicked in with the role at the very sharp end of the economic climate, the retail environment and climate that we're operating in, but I'm loving it. I've got a fantastic team both in our Leaves and Waterford operation, but also globally, as I've seen. We support customers globally with our ASOS partners. So, yeah, loving it, really enjoying it.

Speaker 1: 2:32

So how does CX operations differ for a pure play digital retailer like yourself from some other organizations that people might be familiar with? What are the challenges and opportunities that?

Speaker 2: 2:44

brings. If I was to say what's different in terms of how we support our customers at ASOS versus other players, one of the obvious strict differences that most contact center leaders will recognize is that we don't really use telephony as a channel. So because we're a digital native organization, there's almost a legacy in the history of a lot of the support processes have been very online, based through the site and through the app, and what we've done over the past two to three years is made that much more of a live operation. So we've tried to work, but there are a number of other organizations that we're sure we all deal with where there's lots of email processes. We found this very inefficient channel, so we shifted a lot of that channel away and moved to live chat, which is much more effective at resolving for the customer live. So I'd say that that's probably the difference in terms of how we operate compared to the, I suppose, the general contact center environment.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Yeah, and talk to us about. You serve a particular customer, demographic typically under 30 years old. A few questions there. You know what do they want in the way of service? Is there any difference?

Speaker 2: 4:02

It probably is. Yeah, so, as you say, our target demographic is 20-somethings. You know, we're very explicit in our strategy around. We want to be the, you know, the number one retail or fashion destination for 20-something. That's the space that we operate in. We have customers outside of that remit, including myself in my 40s, you know I still shop and me occasionally.

Speaker 2: 4:24

Yep, there you go, keith. Good to have your custom. So, yeah, we, I'd say those customers are. They engage a lot with digital interaction. So if I think about things we've done for example, implementing virtual assistance across a number of our different language sites it feels like our customers have adopted that really well and really easily. So I think there's, with our customer base, there's a real desire just to resolve stuff themselves and get an answer to a question and what it goes through to an advisor. Actually it's the more complex queries or the frustrations of I've been around the houses here guys. I really need somebody to resolve this for me now. So there's a desire to resolve stuff for themselves, I think from our place.

Speaker 1: 5:12

Yeah, and how do you have to structure that differently from what might be a traditional service organization?

Speaker 2: 5:20

I think I suppose what you, if you imagine. So our customer base. Take the UK customer base as an example. I could pick on Germany, I could pick on US, etc.

Speaker 2: 5:30

Most of our, or a high number of our, purchases, so 80% is done through a mobile device, not on desktop. Of that, 80%, I'd say globally, nearly 60% of our sales are done through the app. So as a customer, you're in an app and so what we, what we almost have to do, is is try and make that journey as frictionless as we can. Unfortunately, at the moment, what we do our customer care journey actually takes the customer out of the app and into mobile web, and that's a project that we're working on in the background to make that more seamless for the customer. But I think the key thing to think about is that the customer is there and live and they're in the app the most of the time, so you've got to be watchous of that. They're either trying to purchase something or actually they're waiting for a delivery, they're waiting for a refund or if turn or whatever it might be. So then they're looking for as quick a response as possible, which it helps the strategy to move to live chat, away from channels like email.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Yeah, and I was going to ask does that customer expect at the front end, as we touched on how your service differs, but at the front end do they expect a certain type of experience. I'm thinking very much about speed connection, auto automation, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 6:54

Yeah, so we did some research a few years ago now, keith, actually, so we're starting to look at refreshing it. But we asked our customers almost what does the perfect customer experience look like? Customer service experience look like when they need help or they need support, and it's very much around make it quick, make it simple, resolve my issue. So those are the resounding things that came out and they kind of formed some of the CX principles that we follow in our service strategy. So, yeah, it's definitely about speed, it's definitely about owning it and taking responsibility and just finding a resolution.

Speaker 1: 7:34

We touched on in your bio about the new channel strategy, and tell us a bit more about that. You've talked about going more live. Tell us about that program.

Speaker 2: 7:44

So we probably nearly three years ago now, actually, we had a fairly new leadership team, including myself and a number of other colleagues, so we kind of took a step back and looked at how we served customers. Today and as a business, I think what we've done historically is almost tried to offer every channel to the customers, almost give them all this different type of choice. But then operationally, in terms of how we were set up, we weren't really set up to be able to offer all of those channels. So if you imagine, if you, historically, you'd have gone on the ASOS website and you'd have had a live chat link, but you'd have also had an email send us an email link You'd have had a link to Facebook Messenger. You'd have had a link to Twitter Messenger Further down hidden somewhere. You'd have probably had a telephone number as well, even though most of our customers didn't call in. And what we were finding is not a huge amount of customers were using live chat, but actually we're getting lots of emails and social interactions and these were just queuing. So what we were doing is creating delay and not responding to the customer query. And if you think about social channels, actually if you go on social, you're looking for, yes, asynchronous, but you're looking for a level of instant response or close to instant response to your query. And those social queries were kind of sitting with the emails and they were queuing. So we basically looked at the difference.

Speaker 2: 9:10

So we've got 12 online stores, obviously different languages, so French, german, italian, spanish, uk, us et cetera. So we systematically looked at those online stores to say, actually, let's look at the interaction, let's pick one and let's be a little bit brave. So we systematically turned off social channels and turned off email. We didn't do them both together, we did one first. So a very good example of that is we took a market and we turned off social, all the links to Facebook and Twitter et cetera, which left the customer with mail and live chat.

Speaker 2: 9:48

And just on the market, social was making up whatever it was 30% of the contact, the fortune to the contact. Very few of those customers went to email. They all went to live chat, which basically that was live inside, to say I'm looking for an instant response, guys, and you're not giving through these social channels. So that gave us a real strong insight and we saw already that the resolution rate in live chat was much higher than channels like email, because, as you can imagine, if you're very busy, if you send an email you don't get a response in three days, you're gonna send another one. Failed resolution, right? So you're not chasing.

Speaker 2: 10:25

So moving the channels to live resolution all of a sudden shifted our resolution left, shifted our resolution rate. It meant customers were getting a response live.

Speaker 1: 10:35

So that's shifting it to live. You've obviously worked in a number of organizations before ASUS. Is that something that you think every organization should move towards, or is it very much particular for ASUS and businesses like each other and what happens?

Speaker 2: 10:49

that they've to decide over themselves so much. If you've got a similar customer demographic to ASOS, there's no reason why you couldn't deploy the strategies that we've got Because, as I say, the customers adopted it. We track an obsess over our TNPS score from our interactions and contacts and that's only gone up, it's not gone down. So that's our customers telling us they're happy with the way that they're interacting with us. But if your demographic is much broader, so I suppose a competitor example will be somebody like Zalando, whilst they're a competitor and a heavy competitor in Europe. They don't just target 20 somethings, they serve men in their 70s, they serve their children's clothes. I think they do some homeware potentially as well. So it's a much broader demographic. Therefore, there's a certain section of that demographic where they might want a telephone number. So actually I think our strategy is quite fitting to ASOS and the demographic and the customer base that we've got. Yeah, it doesn't mean that customers maybe shouldn't be. I suppose other companies shouldn't be brave and try to miss things.

Speaker 1: 12:01

I'm interested in that. Are there things that you can't or wouldn't do as an online pure play retailer? What are the drawbacks from a CX perspective?

Speaker 2: 12:13

What are the drawbacks? So did you have a chance to answer that, Keith? What do you mean by that, Zalando?

Speaker 1: 12:21

Are there ways of servicing customers that you just wouldn't do so? For example, you don't have much in the web contact centre. Are there other things that other organisations would expect to have that you just either don't, can't or won't do by being a pure play online business?

Speaker 2: 12:37

Yeah, I suppose the physical service side doesn't exist. For us, that's the obvious one. I think email is an obvious channel that a lot of organisations use, in particular for things like escalations, and I suppose my personal view and our strategy is the more you can empower your front line teams, ie our live chat teams, the less you need that escalation route. And obviously you need to think about accessibility for customers, which is something we talk about. However, for example, would I open up an email channel for specific customer queries or specific type of thing? I don't think I would, because I know from the evidence of the work that we've done, the customer is much more likely to get a resolution by following a live interaction on live chat. So that's probably the best answer which kind of supports the structures that we're deploying.

Speaker 1: 13:41

We're obviously hearing an awful lot across all our events, across everybody we talk to and across the industry at the moment about automation, AI particularly. I'm interested. A lot of businesses are starting down that road, but you're already a digital business, so what does that look like for you?

Speaker 2: 14:02

So in the last two years. One of the interesting observations I made when I started at ASAS actually was that we're a digital native organisation, an e-commerce business, and every single one of our customer support interactions, ie customer care, was analogous for the human being. I was genuinely not backed by that. I think that was because of different focus in the past, different levels of investment. So one of the first things that I worked on was almost the business case for digitisation, which was the obvious option because of the channel strategy we were deploying, the lack of telephony channel and the strategy we deployed, where we're now 85% to 9%. Live chat is a huge gift if you're looking to digitise interactions but still make it conversational, because Live chat is the perfect channel to align to a VA or a virtual assistant or a chatbot. So that's, in essence, what we did.

Speaker 2: 15:01

So we took our six large online stores. So you've got the UK, germany, france, and then you've got the US, rest of the world, which services kind of Middle East, far East, etc. Then you've got the rest of Europe, which those countries outside of France, germany, etc. We've got a virtual assistant on each of those online stores now and that's our entry point to customer care. So you'll always interact with a virtual assistant. We'll never block an interaction with an advisor. But the more we fine tune, the more we mature the NLU within those virtual assistants, the more we can answer first time with the customer.

Speaker 1: 15:40

Are you finding that successful to check the virtual assistant, because obviously a lot of organisations are struggling with that.

Speaker 2: 15:46

Yeah, and very successful. When we first set up the programme, we had a number of principles around 18 or 9 principles which are very customer orientated, and we really stuck to those principles. You know one of those we would net there's never a route that wouldn't take you to an advisor if you need to speak to An advisor where you know I'm sure we've all seen the chatbots out there where actually I bet this week it's a closed door, keith.

Speaker 2: 16:14

You can't go anyone. That that's not customer service, that's not customer care. Customer care is actually, yes, digitized give. Give the customer the answer they want in the simplest format. For me, that's a better customer experience than waiting and then having a longer interaction, especially for the demo, for demographic. That we did, that we deal with and, yeah, it's been very successful. And you know we're answering a Really good proportion, different across different markets. So we see different Adoption rates across across different markets and different areas, which, which is interesting. And but yeah, we, we, we do a very good job of Closing off and answering first-time queries through the virtual assistant and then, obviously, if they it's a more complex query, it's something that virtual assistant isn't trained to do with them, yes, which an advisor, or the live chat.

Speaker 1: 17:04

I Think you more personally now as you touch on had a promotion in January. How have you found the transition to director level? Have you found that?

Speaker 2: 17:15

Genuinely really enjoyed it. I I'm very lucky with the team that I have. So you know my team or in essence, were six, seven, eight months ago peers. You know a number of them were peers and you know the guys and I we've adopted to that really well. There's a huge amount of respect there between between us all. I think personal reflections on Moving to to a director is it kind of changes the focus and the different, the conversations that you're having. So I spend more time with wider business stakeholders In in ASOS, as you'd expect, in in our head office and actually I suppose a bit of a personal reflection is it's probably a little bit more lonely, almost.

Speaker 2: 18:05

You know, if you think about being part, you know, for example, I was the head of change and run all the transformation and then run the operation for six months. You're still part of that leadership team and there's a level of working together with the other heads off to solve problems, etc and sometimes actually as the core decision maker, as the accountable person. There's a bit of this kind of bit of a loneliness there that Let the guys crack on and then you know I've got to be thinking about the next thing that's coming down the line and how we're gonna solve that problem. Or you know, a really good example is we. We just come to the end of our three year plan, where we executed a lot of the digitization I've just talked about. Actually, I've got to start shaping the next three years, the next one.

Speaker 1: 18:49

What are?

Speaker 2: 18:49

our goals? What are ambitious things that we want to achieve? Who do I need to engage in the business to do that? So yeah, those are probably the big, the big differences. And listen, I'm still learning, keith. I've got a lot of thought, a long way to go in terms of Probably being the director that I want to be.

Speaker 1: 19:06

Yeah, it's a tough journey. I went through that myself, so you have my support and sympathy. Talk just about how you got started in customer service. You've had some really interesting roles prior to ASOS. Talk us a little bit about your journey.

Speaker 2: 19:21

Yeah. So I, if I think about right back to the start. So post university I was a semi-professional footballer actually, keith. At the same time I used to work in a gym as a fitness instructor, so obviously got to use the gym for free, which is quite useful because I trained quite a lot being playing football but at the same time I was constantly interacting with customers. I really enjoyed the service element of that role.

Speaker 2: 19:53

I then kind of thought I needed to grow up a little bit and I went and worked for what was then Britannia Billing Society. Worked in their mortgage service, in departments in customer service, developed a real passion actually for kind of process improvement. So seeing things that were wrong when thinking actually we should try and improve that that's not great. So very quickly moved into process improvement type activity. I then spent two, two and a half years on a leadership program at Britannia. So I was very lucky to apply and get accepted on their accelerated leadership program.

Speaker 2: 20:30

But what was interesting in doing that is, you know, I went off and did the bits of work in other functions. So I spent some time in marketing, did some work in marketing, central change and project management, which linked a little bit more to technology and product but I always hunkered back to service. I spent a significant amount of time designing our savings strategy for our savings centre that we had at the time for the service team there and then as soon as I came off that program I went straight back into our contact centre world, working with Anne Marie Stagg actually, who you'll know one of the leaders in the UK and the industry, and working in the sales centres for the Co-op Bank as Britannia then merged with the Co-op. So I've always hunkered back to that service operational side of things.

Speaker 2: 21:23

And then that's kind of progressed me from there, really from designing service strategy for WESA and Assurance, which is a kind of life and investment company in Birmingham, moving into Vodafone obviously a huge organisation designing service strategy, contact centre, state strategy and delivering major programmes for Vodafone, and then, stuck in that space, worked with the very group as part of a role that I did with Go Beyond and WebHelp, helping them to design continuous improvement strategies, and then moved into ASOS. So, yeah, always kind of operated in that space and in terms there was a leader at the Co-op Bank I worked for when I ran the improvement activities in the sales centre and something that always stuck with me. That he said to me was no matter where you go in your career, always make sure you're as close as you can be to the customer, because that's kind of the thing that will. It seems like it's your passion and actually it's a really good place to be, and that's stuck with me a lot and that's probably why I'm in the job that I'm doing today.

Speaker 1: 22:33

What are you most proud of throughout your career? What is the biggest achievement for you?

Speaker 2: 22:40

To be completely honest, I think it was getting the initial role at ASOS. So I've always wanted to operate in the customer care and the operations and contact centre space because I've enjoyed it and obviously that's where I've developed my experience. I've always loved the transformational side of it, you know, really overseeing major changes, seeing a shift from left to right. And then when I was spoken to about the role at ASOS, I was a huge advocate of the company, massive customer. I was a premier customer, I was shot with them for years, bought most things through ASOS, so it's had a real affiliation with the brand. And then somebody's calling me to say, oh, by the way, I've got the huge transformational role at ASOS. It's like, okay, that kind of sounds like my perfect job. So you know, that was it and obviously it's enabled me to to progress within ASOS and move into the role that I'm in today. So, yeah, very proud and kind of humbled to sit in, you know, be referred to as the director of customer care for ASOS.

Speaker 1: 23:45

Amazing, amazing. Where does it go wrong? What's the biggest issue you've ever had to overcome?

Speaker 2: 23:54

Oh God, where would I start there, Keith?

Speaker 1: 23:57

That's how you learn right through this operation that goes on every day.

Speaker 2: 24:01

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I think a good example is we you know, pete, last year you know we're talking before we kicked him up with the podcast, where you, you know I think is a big thing for our industry, right, as you know, keith, and you do a lot of preparation. You build the teams up, you do a lot of ramp up of resources in the contact center space and last year so November 22, we've done a huge amount of preparation and we couldn't have been more prepared. We went ramp up early because we are learning from the previous year was around build competence early because it will protect your service and protect the TNPS for the customers. So we've done everything right.

Speaker 2: 24:46

And then in the UK in particular, the things that are outside of your control tend to be the things that kind of throw this up in the air. So we, we had a combination of huge role male strikes and we use role males as one of our key three or four carriers in the UK, as did a lot of other organizations who were doing online retail and ramping up for peak. Everybody switched or it seemed like everybody switched a lot of that volume over to to every and it felt like the whole the supply chain kind of crumbled a little bit in the UK industry, which is a massive challenge for us because, again for those listening who worked in the retail industry, big part of your demand is my order should have arrived today or my order should have arrived yesterday. It's not here. Where is it? And in some circumstances we could say we know exactly where it is. But we can bear with us, give us 48 hours because we think it's going to land in the next 48 hours.

Speaker 2: 25:46

But actually because of because the challenges in the network, there were a whole chunk of customers where we in essence said we kind of don't know, but we're going to work with the carriers, we're going to talk to the carriers and listen. We've got a really great working relationship with our delivery solutions team who manage our global carrier network, which is, as you can imagine, vast and calm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we were, you know, given the scale of our UK market, we do actually work really closely directly with the carriers as well, so we have monthly meetings with every, as an example, is a big part of our delivery network, alongside the whole mail, alongside alongside others. There's a lot of collaboration there and there was a lot of actually collected problem solving, which which actually meant that come January, when actually the network had started to stabilize, our recovery was really quick because we've collaborated and we've problem solved together. But that was a real challenge for us last year.

Speaker 1: 26:45

And hopefully, hopefully not the case this year. So we wish you all that. So, as you know, we'd like to ask our guests to reflect and help us come up through the industry so you can go back to being 25 again. What advice would you give to young self?

Speaker 2: 27:02

Go traveling more before you have kids. That's a challenge. Go into the world. There's lots of places on the bucket list there haven't they haven't hit yet. I would definitely say be, be braver. I think throughout my career, and probably even now, I've always carried a level imposter syndrome with me, I think in the you know, am I good enough to apply for that? Am I good enough to do that? Do you think I could do that? But actually, what's the worst that could happen, right? So I think that would be the biggest piece of advice I give to myself. But if you see something that's not just go and do it, just go for it. Right, are you going to do something else, right?

Speaker 1: 27:46

Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, how do you want?

Speaker 2: 27:50

more of a relatively senior. That's a piece of advice you know probably pass on to.

Speaker 1: 27:56

I think, you're right. So how do you want more of an escape from it all? Obviously, it's a busy life being a director. Tell us a few things about you. We wouldn't know about you out of work.

Speaker 2: 28:07

So I run a lot 10 times, run three, four times a week. I was trying to get a couple of half marathons in this year, but I keep getting injured. People invite me to play charity football matches and I can't say no. That's part of my problem, keith. So, yeah, I do like to run a lot, go to the gym a lot. I like to keep fit and that's something I've done since stop playing football, really, because I've got a bit of a thing for being fit and being healthy. I run a Sunday football team. So my son's under 14, so we're just about to start a new season.

Speaker 2: 28:45

this year so that takes a fair bit of time. We're training and matches on Sunday and making sure we're there, yeah, and the travelling and the organisation. Yeah, and my son also plays for another team on a Saturday, and then my daughter. I've got twin daughters who are eight and they've just started playing football as well. So I suspect Sunday's now between myself and my wife.

Speaker 1: 29:07

That's your weekend for the next 10 years, right, Basically yeah, basically.

Speaker 2: 29:11

Yeah, that takes up a lot of my time to be there.

Speaker 1: 29:14

Amazing, Darrell. It's been wonderful having you with us today. Hope our listeners have found this as insightful as I have. You can find out lots more about the Customer Experience Foundation at cxfoorg and we hope you can join us next time on CXFiries.