Dunlop Sports elevates its game with omnichannel CX

Fueled by a love of the game, Dunlop Sports has been creating state-of-the-art equipment for 130 years. Now a global family of brands, Cleveland Golf, Srixon, XXIO, and Dunlop Racket Sports continue to offer beautifully designed, technically sophisticated sports products and apparel to passionate players around the world.

Cody Gaudreau was inspired to join the company after working in the golf industry and developing an interest in supporting fellow sports enthusiasts. As Customer Experience Manager at Dunlop Sports, he spends a lot of time overseeing the wholesale side of support.

The Customer Experience team includes 97 agents across Sales Support, Commerce Support, Price Desk, and Business Integrations. Because sales reps and territory managers generate the most requests for customer experience, the company’s goal is to free up the sales team from fielding those requests so they can focus on selling.

Dunlop Sports uses Zendesk to provide external customer support to B2B and B2C end users, with business-to-business customers comprising 66 percent of the total user base. As distribution steadily grows with the addition of brands like Asics and Nike, the company continues to evolve support operations to create greater efficiency in order management.

A full-service, centralized CX hub

Dunlop Sports had spent years leveraging an outdated, limited telephony vendor and a Microsoft Outlook inbox. The need for data and integration capabilities fueled the company’s search for a new customer service solution.

Zendesk Suite offers a full-service omnichannel contact center that’s easy to set-up, use, and scale. It’s a vital tool for Dunlop’s 21 agents and three admins in Sales Support, who manage four CX channels across six brands and 10 distributors. Implementing Zendesk helped the company unlock more CX features and generate better ROI than the previous system.

“The biggest benefit for us was the increased reporting capabilities. We really wanted all the reporting to be housed in one space, and the on-premises phone system that we previously had just didn’t have that,” Gaudreau explains. “In order to maximize our efficiency and gain the data that we need to make business decisions, we were pleased with the reporting capabilities that we had from email channels. So it was a no-brainer for us to add Zendesk Talk.”

Omnichannel CX enables growth

Dunlop Sports leverages Zendesk voice, live chat, messaging, email, web form, and help center, and is getting ready to implement Zendesk AI. Voice and email channels create the largest volume of tickets due to escalations, but messaging and live chat have seen the most growth. Having the right CX tools in place has prepared the team to handle higher volumes without interrupting service quality.

“Our annual ticket volume is roughly 275,000 interactions a year, and it’s growing by double digits year over year,” shares Gaudreau. For example, Dunlop Sports saw a 12 percent increase in total annual tickets, up from 224,000 interactions in 2023. During the same period, chat volume alone increased by a whopping 168 percent.

Consistent experiences across channels

There’s a high demand for voice support among golfers, so Dunlop Sports maintains a phone-first approach to CX and is a heavy user of Zendesk Talk. With Zendesk, the team has realized the benefits of leveraging voice alongside digital channels, such as managing the customer journey and centralizing data in one place. Having support channels working in tandem creates a better experience for agents and customers.

“Zendesk helps correlate all the times that somebody calls by providing the notes and the tracking of customer interactions. That helps us speed up the process and cut down on the average handle time of a phone call, because we have all the context we need to deliver a consistent message,” Gaudreau says.

Boasting a 95.8 percent SLA Adherence, 1.9 hour first response time, and 3.7 hour full response time, Dunlop Sports attributes the greatest impact on agent efficiency and productivity to the implementation of Zendesk omnichannel ticketing.

“The use of Agent Workspace and omnichannel routing has allowed our agents to be more efficient. We can streamline the processes, present the tickets in a way that helps them prioritize the tasks that they should be working on, and it helps to set the workload of all the team to more easily manage and staff our busy times and channels,” explains Gaudreau.

Faster service with data to prove it

Zendesk also makes it simple to leverage data and reporting in decision making. A unified workspace and centralized data helps inform the company’s self-service versus digital-first versus phone-first workflows, and ultimately supports how they plan for agent improvement and professional growth.

“Data and reporting is essential for us now, and it was a necessity when we were trying to make the conversion to a remote workforce. We needed to be able to provide analytics and data showing that people were just as, if not more, efficient working from home,” states Gaudreau.

With Zendesk, Dunlop Sports’ answer time is 89 percent faster, averaging just 18 seconds. Equally as impressive, the team only sees 0.4 percent customer abandonment, a 96 percent improvement from the previous year.

Vice President of Operations Michael Mullen adds, “We have dramatically improved the level of service we’ve been able to provide both internal and external customers, which wouldn’t have been possible without Zendesk functionality and reporting.”

The company’s CSAT score has increased to 95.3 percent, suggesting that customers appreciate the gains in efficiency and service quality, too.

Staffing based on seasonal volume

Managing workload and volume across channels efficiently is no easy task. The company has established voice as the primary support channel, followed by chat and messaging, because they enable live conversations.

As a seasonal sports equipment provider, Dunlops’ Support team has CX volumes that ebb and flow, which impacts staffing. The team manages this by establishing March through July as a period solely focused on providing customer support. Projects, optimizations, and new feature rollouts are scheduled to occur during the rest of the year. While workforce engagement management (WEM) is offered natively in Zendesk, Dunlop currently uses Zenalytics for QA and Assembled for workforce management.

Future integrations and AI

Moving forward, Gaudreau’s team plans to take advantage of Zendesk’s vast integration capabilities. The next CX project will be establishing a more detailed integration between the company’s ERP and Zendesk to help agents become more effective and efficient.

The team at Dunlop Sports is also excited to see how Zendesk AI can impact their CX operations. “The goal for Zendesk AI is to help streamline processes, make agents more efficient, and help them smooth the edges for the interactions with the customer,” explains Gaudreau. “Ultimately, we are hoping to improve CSAT scores, get more self-service for the customers, and a bit more ticket deflection, because everybody’s trying to do more with less headcount.”

A growing partnership with Zendesk

Overall, Gaudreau is pleased with the team’s progress, noting that “Zendesk has been a great partner for us every step of the way.” Given Dunlop Sports’ minimal IT staff, it was important to have a CX system that the team could easily implement and own themselves. Working with Zendesk has instilled a sense of collaboration and confidence that continues to benefit the company.

“The partnership with Zendesk is really a two-way street,” says Gaudreau. “We give them the idea that we have, how we want to set up the system, and they give us best practices. It’s really a constructive conversation to figure out the best way to implement whatever the change is correctly the first time.”