ContributionsMost RecentMost LikesSolutions2021 Customer Awards: European Wax Center - Bottom Line Savings Rock Star Company: European Wax Center Company background: European Wax Center is a leading personal care franchise brand founded in 2004. They offer expert wax services from certified Wax Specialists, ensuring that every guest who walks through the door leaves feeling confident—in European Wax Center and themselves. European Wax Center provides guests with a first class, professional waxing experience by the most highly trained estheticians in the industry, within the privacy of clean, individual waxing suites. They’re so certain everyone will love the European Wax Center experience, they offer a free complimentary wax to each new guest. European Wax Center continues to revolutionize the waxing category with their innovative, signature Comfort Wax™. This proprietary blend is formulated with the highest quality ingredients to leave skin feeling smooth and make waxing a more pleasant, virtually painless experience. To help enhance and extend waxing services, European Wax Center offers a full collection of proprietary pre- and post-wax products designed specifically for waxing skincare solutions called EWC to treat, groom, glow and slow. European Wax Center is a leading wax specialty personal care brand in the United States, and its network now includes over 800 centers nationwide. For more information, including how to receive your first wax free, please visit: www.waxcenter.com. Contact: Kara Salazar Title: Social Media Manager Related URLs: waxcenter.com, Facebook.com/EuropeanWax, Instagram.com/EuropeanWax, Twitter.com/EuropeanWax Kudos Category: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star 1. Tell us how you are implementing Khoros’ digital engagement technologies (e.g. community and/or social media management) to meet your customer care business goals. Please highlight unique programs, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals. Being a Franchise, services and retail business adds a lot of layers to the European Wax Center business. Our Guest Relations team utilizes many tools in our business to not only properly answer guest questions and concerns but to inform our independently owned and operated centers of complaints and comments. As our Franchisees are not on Khoros, combining all of our tools into one care platform and custom building a forwarding feature for our team to forward emails and social posts to franchisees allowed for a 360-guest view and better accountability with our individual centers. 2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change? This customized and integrated system has allowed for our agents to move from 6 screens open at all times to 1 screen needed to handle all guest inquiries. It has also decreased agent response time per guest by 55% from 5 minutes to 2.2 minutes. And overall interactions from agents are much more thorough than prior. The integrated system allows for agents to take the time needed to handle sensitive and important care issues all while not neglecting the easy and basic guest inquiries. 3. What are your customer care and business results in quantifiable metrics? Include support savings metrics (e.g. cost savings, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, increased agent productivity, optimizing campaigns, and efficiency with publishing and reporting). We had a 81% decrease in cost MoM by switching platforms. On our previous platform we were paying 420% more and utilizing 6 different screens for 1 guest facing interaction. This resulted in agents having to spend more time on the platform and needing more agents to complete simple guest inquiries. Now we are closing cases in 16-24 hrs with an average handle time of 2min or less! Instead of managers having to focus on agent tasks, they are able to focus on their true roles increasing productivity across the board! Avg Time Per Case Total Cases Time In Platform Agents Needed at 40 hrs per week to complete Old Platform 5 min. 1,200 100 hrs 2.5 New Platform 2 min. 1,200 60 hrs 1.5 2021 Customer Awards: European Wax Center - The Accelerator Company: European Wax Center Company background: European Wax Center is a leading personal care franchise brand founded in 2004. They offer expert wax services from certified Wax Specialists, ensuring that every guest who walks through the door leaves feeling confident—in European Wax Center and themselves. European Wax Center provides guests with a first class, professional waxing experience by the most highly trained estheticians in the industry, within the privacy of clean, individual waxing suites. They’re so certain everyone will love the European Wax Center experience, they offer a free complimentary wax to each new guest. European Wax Center continues to revolutionize the waxing category with their innovative, signature Comfort Wax™. This proprietary blend is formulated with the highest quality ingredients to leave skin feeling smooth and make waxing a more pleasant, virtually painless experience. To help enhance and extend waxing services, European Wax Center offers a full collection of proprietary pre- and post-wax products designed specifically for waxing skincare solutions called EWC to treat, groom, glow and slow. European Wax Center is a leading wax specialty personal care brand in the United States, and its network now includes over 800 centers nationwide. For more information, including how to receive your first wax free, please visit: www.waxcenter.com. Contact: Kara Salazar Title: Social Media Manager Related URLs: waxcenter.com, Facebook.com/EuropeanWax, Instagram.com/EuropeanWax, Twitter.com/EuropeanWax Kudos Category: The Accelerator 1. Please describe your company and your initiative. In early 2020, European Wax Center restructured the social media and guest relations strategy by bringing on an experienced social media manager, integrating social media care into the guest relations team, and onboarding the Khoros platform. With Khoros as a partner, European Wax Center successfully weathered the most disruptive months of the COVID-19 pandemic. But franchises added an extra layer of complexity to customer care, and even with the social media and web chat conversations in one place on Khoros, European Wax Center still didn’t have the complete customer view they needed. So, European Wax Center decided to integrate email into the Khoros platform, making Khoros our single command center for customer service engagement on every channel. European Wax Center also took advantage of Khoros’ open APIs and to build impressive routing and agent tools with our automation partner Headliner Labs. To speed up routing across 2400 different potential email addresses, inbound emails are automatically tagged with their relevant location, and agents are prompted with a simple widget in Khoros Care to select the best franchise staffer to forward to (center email, location owner, corporate support, or a combination). As emails are ingested, Khoros automatically updates customer data in European Wax Center’s external data lake, and serves up relevant information on the customer in the agent dashboard. 2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome? Before we integrated email into the Khoros platform, guests would often contact the brand on social media, chat the brand on web chat, and then also contact the brand through the contact us form on our website. The guest relations team couldn’t see all guest interactions in one place, leading to doubled-up responses, or worse, guests left without a response. The Guest Relations team also had to switch between six different screens in order to handle all responses which caused for longer SLA’s . 3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results. Now, the team can see all social media interactions, chatbot conversations, and emails in one place, with holistic conversation history, ensuring they deliver quick, consistent service without stepping on each other's toes. Guest Relations saw a 55% decrease in agent response time going from 6 platforms to 1 and all guests being responded to in 3 minutes or less. 2021 Customer Awards: European Wax Center - Better Together: Customer Engagement Company: European Wax Center Company background: European Wax Center is a leading personal care franchise brand founded in 2004. They offer expert wax services from certified Wax Specialists, ensuring that every guest who walks through the door leaves feeling confident—in European Wax Center and themselves. European Wax Center provides guests with a first class, professional waxing experience by the most highly trained estheticians in the industry, within the privacy of clean, individual waxing suites. They’re so certain everyone will love the European Wax Center experience, they offer a free complimentary wax to each new guest. European Wax Center continues to revolutionize the waxing category with their innovative, signature Comfort Wax™. This proprietary blend is formulated with the highest quality ingredients to leave skin feeling smooth and make waxing a more pleasant, virtually painless experience. To help enhance and extend waxing services, European Wax Center offers a full collection of proprietary pre- and post-wax products designed specifically for waxing skincare solutions called EWC to treat, groom, glow and slow. European Wax Center is a leading wax specialty personal care brand in the United States, and its network now includes over 800 centers nationwide. For more information, including how to receive your first wax free, please visit: www.waxcenter.com. Contact: Kara Salazar Title: Social Media Manager Related URLs: waxcenter.com, Facebook.com/EuropeanWax, Instagram.com/EuropeanWax, Twitter.com/EuropeanWax Kudos Category: Better Together: Customer Engagement 1. Tell us about your integration as well as your goal and key strategies. Throughout the pandemic and, as European Wax Center evolved, our external communications team saw a need for better processes and support. While social media care was originally handled by our Social Media Manager and more traditional customer service cases were handled by our Guest Relations team, the team saw an opportunity for efficiency and a better guest experience. As our Guest Relations and Social Media sit within the same External Communications team, it allowed for the Guest Relations team to take over all social media inquiries as well freeing up time for our Social Media Manager to publish more content tailored to guest wants and needs. While our Social Media team mainly works out of Marketing, integrating Care between the two teams allows for deeper guest insight across all channels. Social Media can utilize Marketing analytics, Intelligence and Care analytics to inform guest conversations, sentiment and make content decisions based on real-time conversation and data. Integration between the two platforms also allows for our Guest Relations team to communicate with our Social Media team and be part of community management instead of simply resolving guest issues. Agents are able to tag the Social Media team when they see trending content, influencer posts, or community conversations. This allows empowerment for the Guest Relations team and integrates them in marketing initiatives and allows for our social media team to focus on strategy while knowing community management has a constant eye. 2. Share your plan with the target audience and how your digital technology helped provide a better customer engagement experience. By integrating the two teams, we were able to create better engagement as a whole for our social media accounts. Our Guest Relations team is able to not only solve guest issues but engage with guests and ensure overall sentiment on our social media accounts stays positive. Social Media is able to quickly see trends and important mentions while focusing on strategy and analytics and building the accounts. The collaboration and teamwork helps integrate the entire External Communications team together for seamless conversations. Khoros helps to make communication easier with the help of tagging, assigning, and integrations within the tool. 3. What were the results? Tell us how it helped you meet your strategic goals. Please include metrics if possible. By our Guest Relations team effectively utilizing both Marketing and Care solutions we were able to meet our strategic goals of increased guest sentiment. Increased guest sentiment has a domino effect that plays into our higher company pillar of increasing our guest frequency and loyalty and our smaller team objectives of overall heightened guest experience and satisfaction! 2021 Customer Awards: European Wax Center - Best-in-Class: Care Company: European Wax Center Company background: European Wax Center is a leading personal care franchise brand founded in 2004. They offer expert wax services from certified Wax Specialists, ensuring that every guest who walks through the door leaves feeling confident—in European Wax Center and themselves. European Wax Center provides guests with a first class, professional waxing experience by the most highly trained estheticians in the industry, within the privacy of clean, individual waxing suites. They’re so certain everyone will love the European Wax Center experience, they offer a free complimentary wax to each new guest. European Wax Center continues to revolutionize the waxing category with their innovative, signature Comfort Wax™. This proprietary blend is formulated with the highest quality ingredients to leave skin feeling smooth and make waxing a more pleasant, virtually painless experience. To help enhance and extend waxing services, European Wax Center offers a full collection of proprietary pre- and post-wax products designed specifically for waxing skincare solutions called EWC to treat, groom, glow and slow. European Wax Center is a leading wax specialty personal care brand in the United States, and its network now includes over 800 centers nationwide. For more information, including how to receive your first wax free, please visit: www.waxcenter.com. Contact: Kara Salazar Title: Social Media Manager Related URLs: waxcenter.com, Facebook.com/EuropeanWax, Instagram.com/EuropeanWax, Twitter.com/EuropeanWax Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Care 1. What were your organization’s digital customer service initiatives? What channels do you support today? European Wax Center’s customer service is focused on providing the best guest experience possible. One of European Wax Center’s founding values is “We delight our guests.” This value is engrained in the core of our Guest Relations (customer service) model. Guest experience and recovery is the most important piece for our Guest Relations team no matter what channel the guest reaches out on. Our Guest Relations team manages guest communications on: Social media o Facebook (comments and DMs post chatbot) o Instagram (comments and DMs) o Twitter (tags, mentions and DMs) “Contact Us” form on our website E-mail Reviews ( Yelp, Google, Facebook) Waxcenter.com chatbot 2. What was the most important issue you were looking to solve via your digital technology (e.g. community and/or social media management platform) — and what makes your approach to that achievement unique? Overall guest experience and Franchisee accountability were the main issues the European Wax Center team was looking to solve. Not only does European Wax Center have many ways a guest can contact the brand, but we are also a Franchise-based business. European Wax Center has 796/800 centers owned by 300+ franchisees. As each business is individually owned and operated, many guest issues or complaints need to be handled by the guest’s individual center and with being a personal care service brand, many guest issues require informing the individual location. The team quickly identified that a 360-guest view was important for overall guest experience. That meant that we wanted to handle guest contacts and issues as a guest and not a “ticket” as many customer care platforms do. We also wanted to be sure our agents would be able to see every instance a guest reached out versus separated contact areas (i.e. Facebook messages besides “Contact Us” form submissions.) After careful consideration, the team decided to migrate all contacts into Khoros for a centralized view of guest contacts. Agents now only need to be in one platform to handle cases instead of multiple. It was also important for agents to have a full view of the guest outside of information provided. We integrated our customer data platform into Khoros utilizing their APIs. Agents can now see guest information such as phone number, preferred center and email on their same screen. The API also allows for continued data ingestion as customer data grows such as Wax Pass information, favorite products and types of waxes last booked. Being a Franchise-based business, European Wax Center needed a way to inform Franchisees of guest issues as well as ensure Franchisee accountability. With the use of Khoros’ APIs and with help from Headliner Labs, a third-party agency, we were able to build an integrated email forwarding system. The forward field allows for any customer contact in Khoros to be forwarded to the selected and necessary parties at the center or franchisee level. Data from our Franchise information tool, FranConnect, automatically flows into Khoros and connects to the right center for the guest based on tags and customer data. Agents are able to simply click a button and forward a contact, the details of the contact and guest contact information over to a center so they are able to reach out to the guest. The system also automatically tags the forwarded email for enhanced Guest Relations analytics on a Franchisee and center level. 3. What 1-3 metrics best describe your success? (e.g. CSAT, call deflection, cost reduction, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)). This customized and integrated system has allowed for our agents to move from 6 screens open at all times to 1 screen needed to handle all guest inquiries. It has also decreased agent response time per guest by 55% from 5 minutes to 2.2 minutes. And overall interactions from agents are much more thorough than prior. The integrated system allows for agents to take the time needed to handle sensitive and important care issues all while not neglecting the easy and basic guest inquiries.