Company: European Wax Center
Company background: European Wax Center (EWC) is the worldwide leader of out-of-home waxing services. Centered around their vision of Revealing Beautiful Skin™, EWC guests enjoy exceptional services from professionally trained and certified waxing experts utilizing their exclusive Comfort Wax™. Founded in 2004, EWC offers guests a full suite of waxing services, as well as a proprietary line of beauty products in the skincare, body, and brow categories. As Experts in Wax and Champions of Confidence, a guest’s first wax is always complimentary (brows, underarms, bikini line for women, and nose, ears, and brows for men). The company operates a unique franchise business model, and its network now includes over 750 centers across the U.S. For more, visit www.waxcenter.com.
Contact: Auburn Berry
Title: Director, Social Media / PR / Guest Relations
Related URLs: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok
Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On
1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis?
This year alone European Wax Center has had 3 major crisis situations to handle. In early January a technology data outage created issues for over a month on guests not being able to book online. This increased our social inquiries and the need to assist guests.
In March began the COVID-19 crisis. This resulted in complete closure of our 750+ centers. Our customer inquiries increased 4x on social media. Most of these inquiries were related to refunds, re-opening inquiries and sanitation procedures.
June began the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement increased our overall inquiries by asking what our company was doing to support the cause, reporting on individual crisis situations at a center level (EWC is a Franchise-based company model) and a viral tweet about European Wax Center.
Our team consists of 1 Social Media Manager who handles all incoming social inquiries, manages social media posting, website chatbot through Modern Chat, as well as assists with customer services inquiries in our CRM platform. This created a problem for our team as the increase in mentions and inquiries were being handled by one single person.
2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
By bringing Khoros on board, utilizing templated responses through the Khoros platform and tagging for metrics, our team was able to handle the increase. Not only were we able to successfully handle the volume, we were able to become more efficient based on the inquiry data and help inform overall business decisions such as extending our wax pass, include specifics in our FAQs page and send customer emails based on the inquiry volumes.
Additionally our team was able to leverage Modern Chat to implement a ChatBot for immediate answers to guests. If the ChatBot was unable to answer an agent would be able to live chat. During crisis times the Modern Chat function was able to deflect ~2-3k inquiries.
We also utilized Khoros Intelligence to track and monitor conversations about these crises alongside our brand. This helped inform us of business critical decisions that needed to be made, guest sentiment with all centers closed during COVID and assisted in keeping tabs on the situation.
3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
During crisis times our team used the metrics of post responses, agent SLAs, Modern Chat Responses.
Average in Normal Times
Responses - ~1k
Modern Chat Responses - ~1k
SLA Response Time w/ 1 agent - 24 hours or less
Crisis Times
April - Responses - ~3.9k
Modern Chat Responses - ~2k
SLA Response Time w/ 1 agent - 24 hours or less
May -
Responses - ~4k
Modern Chat Responses - ~2.8k
SLA Response Time w/ 1 agent - 24 hours or less
June -
Responses - ~4k
Modern Chat Responses - ~2k
SLA Response Time w/ 1 agent - 17 hours or less
As you can see, our team was able to handle an extreme increase in volume all while staying within our proper response times as a company. Guests were satisfied and we were able to easily keep a pulse on the conversations happening about our brand. This also helped us mitigate situations before they became further crisis situations during these times. Overall Khoros continues to be a huge support for us during times of crisis while continuing to be a lean team.