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: Auburn Berry Title: Director, Social Media / PR / Guest Relations Kudos Category: All-Ways Connected 1. Tell us about your digital customer experience: When and why did digital customer experience become a focus and priority for your organization and what technology(ies) did you decide to implement to help you, and what problem(s) does it help solve? In early 2020, European Wax Center restructured their social media and guest relations strategy by bringing on an experienced social media manager, integrating social media care into their 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 add an extra layer of complexity to customer care, and even with their 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 their Khoros platform, making Khoros their 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 their 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 are the benefits of having an integrated community and social media management platform for your organization? How does it improve your strategy for digital customer engagement? Before European Wax Center integrated email into their Khoros platform, guests would often contact the brand on social media, chat the brand on web chat, and then also contact the brand through their contact us form on the 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. 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 others’ toes. 3. What are your digital results? Please provide your business outcomes and results because of your digital customer experience approach in quantifiable metrics (e.g. revenue, Net Promoter Score, cost savings, brand reputation). European Wax Center had all of their social media and chat conversations in one place on Khoros, but they still didn’t have the complete customer view they needed. They decided to integrate email into their Khoros platform, making Khoros their single command center for customer service engagement on every channel. Their response times were faster and their care interactions were much more thorough than they were before they integrated email into their Khoros platform. We 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.       ... View more

  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: Auburn Berry Title: Director, Social Media / PR / Guest Relations Related URLs : www.waxcenter.com @EuropeanWax  Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On 1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis? European Wax Center faced several crises in the past year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a temporary closure of all of their centers. This caused their average incoming communications to increase by 300%. Many of these conversations were coming in through Instagram DM’s, which made it difficult since the team couldn’t see if the guest had reached out on other channels and all messages had to be managed organically by the Social Media Manager. This sometimes delayed response times and confused guests with uncoordinated replies. . European Wax Center decided to partner with Khoros and integrate Instagram DM’s into the platform as part of a beta test. 2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis? To keep up with the ever-changing landscape of customers’ preferred messaging channels and 300% increase in conversations due to the times of crisis, European Wax Center integrated Instagram DMs into the Khoros platform.  This made it easier to handle those messages with the same prioritization, filtering, and routing they leverage on other channels. This prevents the team from missing important messages.  Now the team can see all of their social media and chat conversations in one place, with holistic social media and chat conversation history, ensuring they deliver quick service. This also reduced repeat conversation volume, as guests receiving faster responses would no longer send the same question across multiple channels to get support. 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? European Wax Center was able to maintain a consistent SLA (24 hours or fewer with one agent) even with an average 300% increase in incoming communications across Modern chat and social channels during crisis periods. Before partnering with Khoros, European Wax Center struggled to field Instagram care DMs consistently. Since onboarding the platform, we are now able to field 170% more incoming messages, ensuring the needs of their customers are met, no matter the platform. The European Wax Center chatbot has effectively deflected volume from agents and allowed for faster and more meaningful resolution for guests, resulting in a better customer experience overall, and European Wax Center is able to handle a similar level of volume in a more efficient and satisfactory way. ... View more

  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. ... View more

  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: Rookie of the Year 1. Describe your company and your organization. European Wax Center is the world-wide leading personal care waxing brand known for providing guests with a clean, efficient and consistent waxing experience at the hand of trusted experts. Our organization is Franchise-based with over 750 locations throughout the United States. Over the past year our company made the move from Florida to Plano, TX. Alongside that move we restructured our organization with the goal of being efficient and staying small for a corporate office. Our team is structured with one Social Media Manager who handles all social and community management and then one Guest Relations Manager who handles all guest cases from the website and reviews. With a small team we have two other marketing employees who will spend a few hours helping in social or in guest cases, but only as backflow. The team is consistently seeing 1,000+ social inquiries a month alongside 1,500+ guest relations cases and 400+ chatbot inquiries needing responses (1,000+ in Modern Chat that is deflected by the bot) from the website. 2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros and what was your experience before making the switch from a previous solution or investing in new technology. We invested in Khoros to be an all-in-one platform for social. Prior to the restructure, the team was mainly an expensive agency to do community management, which on average were roughly 500 per month across social media platforms (and has increased by 6x in the past 6 months). The agency resulted in missed social comments, lack of response for days and lack of visibility for the European Wax Center in-house team. Guests were not getting engagement from EWC and we noticed it was causing a lack of overall community and following for the EWC accounts. It also meant there was not visibility with our social and customer care teams so we could best help the guest no matter where they inquired. Khoros allowed us to keep a small team but be more efficient with our team and ensure 100% of guest inquiries were handled in a timely manner. 3. What were your goals when investing in Khoros technology and what successes have you already experienced because of the investment? Please include metrics, if possible. Khoros allows us to have more ways for guests to reach out. By bringing Khoros on we were able to eliminate the need for a social media only agency and are able to manage our accounts and community with just our Social Media Manager. Without Khoros our team would be manually responding in platforms which takes additional time, segmented from a holistic view for the guests, and would require additional headcount to keep up. Even with the increase in volume (6x over the past 6 months) and reduction in staff (and an agency), we have seen a response time that once took days reduced to a 17 hour or less average response time for all actionable guest inquiries. This has resulted in increased overall guest sentiment and 100% visibility into customer requests that have resulted in more streamline communication and information to Franchisee owners for center improvement and increased overall customer advocacy.  We were also able to bring on Modern Chat and start a chatbot for our guests on our main website. This has helped decrease overall guest inquiries to the business as they’re able to get their answers right away from the bot, which handles roughly 2.5k conversations per month.. Our social media manager is then able to immediately answer any live questions that the bot is unable to answer while still maintaining all social inquires are responded to in 24 hours or less. These live chats are significantly faster to answer than a guest using our website to submit a new case into our CRM system and allows for more efficiencies within our traditional customer service team. Khoros has made us more efficient, allowed for scalability and helped as we increased our overall presence in social media this year. ... View more

  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: Small but Mighty 1. Describe your company and your organization. European Wax Center is the world-wide leading personal care waxing brand known for providing guests with a clean, efficient and consistent waxing experience at the hand of trusted experts. Our organization is Franchise-based with over 750 locations throughout the United States. Over the past year our company made the move from Florida to Plano, TX. Alongside that move we restructured our organization with the goal of being efficient and staying small for a corporate office. Our team is structured with one Social Media Manager who handles all social and community management and then one Guest Relations Manager who handles all guest cases from the website and reviews. With a small team we have two other marketing employees who will spend a few hours helping in social or in guest cases, but only as backflow. The team is consistently seeing 800+ social inquiries a month alongside 1,500+ guest relations cases and 400+ chatbot inquiries from the website. 2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros? We invested in Khoros to be an all-in-one platform for social. Prior to the restructure, the team was mainly an expensive agency to do community management, which on average were roughly 500 per month across social media platforms (and has increased by 6x in the past 6 months). The agency resulted in missed social comments, lack of response for days and lack of visibility for the European Wax Center in-house team. Guests were not getting engagement from EWC and we noticed it was causing a lack of overall community and following for the EWC accounts. It also meant there was not visibility with our social and customer care teams so we could best help the guest no matter where they inquired. Khoros allowed us to keep a small team but be more efficient with our team and ensure 100% of guest inquiries were handled in a timely manner. 3. How does Khoros help you deliver results beyond what a team your size normally can do? Khoros allows us to have more ways for guests to reach out. By bringing Khoros on we were able to eliminate the need for a social media only agency and are able to manage our accounts and community with just our Social Media Manager. Without Khoros our team would be manually responding in platforms which takes additional time, segmented from a holistic view for the guests, and would require additional headcount to keep up. Even with the increase in volume (6x over the past 6 months) and reduction in staff (and an agency), we have seen a response time that once took days reduced to a 17 hour or less average response time for all actionable guest inquiries. This has resulted in increased overall guest sentiment and 100% visibility into customer requests that have resulted in more streamline communication and information to Franchisee owners for center improvement and increased overall customer advocacy.  We were also able to bring on Modern Chat and start a chatbot for our guests on our main website. This has helped decrease overall guest inquiries to the business as they’re able to get their answers right away from the bot, which handles roughly 2.5k conversations per month. Our social media manager is then able to immediately answer any live questions that the bot is unable to answer while still maintaining all social inquires are responded to in 24 hours or less. These live chats are significantly faster to answer than a guest using our website to submit a new case into our CRM system and allows for more efficiencies within our traditional customer service team. Khoros has made us more efficient, allowed for scalability and helped as we increased our overall presence in social media this year. ... View more