OneSkin increases retention with data-driven CX
Biotech skincare startup OneSkin found the flexibility and data visibility it needed to scale customer service by replacing Gorgias with Zendesk. Customizable, omnichannel support allows agents to communicate with customers in a healthier, more efficient way. The team can also share valuable voice of the customer insights with the entire company and celebrate CX wins, such as a 96 percent CSAT and one-hour reply time.
“If you want to be customer obsessed, you need a tool that you can trust to not only give you the right information, but also let you access it in the easiest way. That’s where Zendesk is a differentiator in the CX space.”
Jessica-Rose Garcia
Customer Experience and Support Manager (CXM) - OneSkin
“We felt like Gorgias was making us fit into their box in order to be successful. We really needed a tool that was going to scale with us and that could provide better scope and visibility into what our customers were saying.”
Jessica-Rose Garcia
Customer Experience and Support Manager (CXM) - OneSkin
Company Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Employees
< 20
Company founded
2016
Started Using Zendesk
2020
96%
CSAT
28%
Increase in customer retention
78%
Decrease in first response time
≤ 10 hrs
Resolution time
The future of skin longevity
The four scientists who founded OneSkin didn’t set out to create a skincare company, but they all shared a passion for developing solutions to prolong human healthspan. Guided by their expertise in skin regeneration, stem cell biology, immunology, and bioinformatics, the team embarked on a new mission: to help aging skin stay healthier and more resilient.
Five years of research led them to develop a proprietary peptide called OS-01, the first ingredient scientifically proven to reverse skin’s biological age. With a new solution in hand, they launched OneSkin in 2016.
CX built on customer obsession
As OneSkin hones its customer service strategy, Jessica-Rose Garcia has been spearheading the effort as Customer Experience and Support Manager (CXM). “I’m customer obsessed, so I like communicating with people and building a relationship,” she says. “It’s an honor every day to be on the front lines working with consumers who use our products.”
Garcia developed a love for the direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce niche while working at a small nutrition startup, and then spent 10 years working in different industries to learn what it takes to build a great customer experience.
At OneSkin, a key challenge is educating customers on such a high level topic. “How do you make it digestible and ensure that you’re talking to them as human beings? And, how do you ensure that conversation is happening naturally across the entire customer journey–from the moment they hear about you, to the purchase, and later on when they need support?”
‘Zendesk can fit every company’
Finding the right CX platform presented another challenge, as OneSkin ran into limitations with its existing solution. “We felt like Gorgias was making us fit into their box in order to be successful,” Garcia recalls. “We really needed a tool that was going to scale with us and that could provide better scope and visibility into what our customers were saying and how quickly we could assist them.”
The quest to improve the customer experience led OneSkin to join the Zendesk for Startups program in 2020. Combining expert support with Zendesk’s industry-leading customer service software has allowed the small team to scale with ease.
“At different companies, I’ve given other tools a shot. They just haven’t met our needs the way Zendesk has been able to,” says Garcia, who first encountered the platform in 2011. “I think Zendesk can fit every company.”
While onboarding team members, she was thrilled to discover they had a shorter learning curve with the new system. “One of my favorite things was seeing people who had only been using Zendesk for three months realize that it’s way more efficient. Their first response times have dropped almost 78 percent, because it’s just easier to use.”
Higher retention with the right channels
For OneSkin’s small team, it made sense to have an email-first and chat-first approach to CX, with an outbound-only voice channel. “We needed a tool that would allow us to leverage telephony without having a live support number. Zendesk gave us the ability to call out, and we didn’t have to receive incoming calls. That was something Gorgias couldn’t do for us,” explains Garcia.
Zendesk’s flexible, omnichannel solution enabled seamless integrations with Wonderment for order tracking, RechargeSMS for subscription management, and Hark for voice and video submission to the customer. Since switching to Zendesk, OneSkin has seen a 28 percent increase in customer retention. Garcia believes that’s partly due to the SMS integration between Recharge and Zendesk, and partly due to customers having an easier way to speak with agents.
The customizability of Zendesk is key to creating positive interactions. “I love that Zendesk allows you to spend more time with customers when you need to. It won’t force you to close out tickets, whereas that was the only option in Gorgias,” says Garcia. She’s also a fan of the on-hold status feature in Zendesk, which reminds agents to follow up with customers after they receive support.
“In my perfect world, no one has any problems, we’re doing everything right, and customers just want to chat with us. In reality, you need a tool that helps you respond efficiently. Switching to Zendesk allowed us to communicate with our customers in a healthier way,” she says.
Using Zendesk support with triggers and automations, OneSkin has achieved a one-touch ticket rate of 56 percent and propelled its CSAT score from 93 to 96 percent.
Reliable reporting keeps everyone on track
Zendesk reporting was a huge improvement for OneSkin, after struggling to get the accurate data and agent usability they needed from Gorgias. For example, Garcia knew that one of the highest contact reasons for tickets was WISMO (Where Is My Order), but she couldn’t prove it because of how Gorgias discerned tag information. With Zendesk, she was able to fix the problem and highlight an issue that was affecting 70 percent of outreach.
“I utilize custom ticket fields within Zendesk–one for contact reason, one for resolution–and then I use Explore to pull custom reports,” Garcia says. “Zendesk has great contact trend reports and makes it easy to disseminate that information. The reports are in plain language and clearly show the resolution, why it matters to us, and what we can do to improve.”
Reporting in Gorgias was a tedious job that involved a long string of tags and arbitrary percentages, and it created confusion by showing an inaccurately high ticket response time.
“Now, we know our true first response time is one hour, and our full resolution time is 10 hours or less,” says Garcia. “I wouldn’t know that or be able to celebrate my team for that if I didn’t have the accurate numbers from Zendesk.”
Valuable customer insights
In Garcia’s experience, “If you want to be customer obsessed, you need a tool that you can trust to not only give you the right information, but also let you access it in the easiest way. That’s where Zendesk is a differentiator in the CX space.”
This year, building a solid voice of the customer platform is top of mind for the team. “We want to make sure we’re not only listening to our customers across support, but that the entire company can digest that voice of the customer data,” Garcia says. “Our reporting is very powerful now. We can use CX data to make proactive decisions across the business and drive better results. We couldn’t elevate the customer experience if we didn’t have the insights into what our customers were talking about and what they needed from us.”
A bright future with Zendesk
Proactive support and self-service are high priorities on OneSkin’s CX roadmap. Garcia looks forward to implementing the Zendesk messaging widget, which lets agents serve help center articles directly to customers on the product detail page.
She also sees an opportunity to enhance the customer experience using AI. “I think artificial intelligence is here to make the agent’s life easier, improve their responses, and be the agent’s best friend–but not replace them,” Garcia says. “The contextual information that Zendesk AI provides from a ticket field perspective is helpful for agents, so they can assist customers quickly without trying to decipher what the person wants.”
As OneSkin matures, Garcia knows that Zendesk will remain a trusted CX partner and community resource. “Zendesk is a leader in this space because they care about the customer and they’re very intelligent about how they provide support,” she says. “I consider Zendesk my D2C bestie, whenever questions come up or I just need a sounding board. That kind of community is priceless.”
