How Balsam Brands provides high-quality and near-native support in France and Germany, while significantly reducing costs

Balsam Brands is a global ecommerce designer and seller of seasonal home decor. Their flagship brand, Balsam Hill, is the leading retailer of faux Christmas trees, artificial floral arrangements and related holiday accessories. Their team serves a diverse clientele in both the B2B and B2C spaces, ranging from TV sets and large hotels to individual customers seeking luxury and high-end products and services. 

Balsam Brands is recognized for their commitment to producing realistic and exceptional decorations as well as their outstanding customer support, which is available in five locations worldwide to ensure prompt and efficient assistance across different time zones and regions.

Challenge

As a global luxury brand dedicated to providing top-tier support, Balsam Brands finds it crucial to support customers in different languages — both to enhance the customer experience as well as to foster positive reviews and word-of-mouth referrals. Ultimately, this allows them to expand into new markets, build trust and rapport with their customers, and drive growth opportunities in additional locations.

When serving luxury markets like France and Germany, where language fluency is crucial for effective communication, providing prompt and effective support in the local languages reinforces their commitment to delivering exceptional service. However, with the high cost of staffing for these language-specific roles in these locations and stiff competition from other companies that offer year-round agent work, it was difficult to find and retain talent. Recruiting for in- and off-season support needs further added to the complexity. All these factors led to a high attrition rate in the customer service department.

Solution

Language IO helped Balsam Brands mitigate the impact of attrition by helping them provide consistent support in different languages, which was critical for maintaining service quality and meeting the needs of their clientele. The employee experience has also improved, and they’ve been receiving positive feedback from agents.

Especially in luxury markets like France and Germany, where attention to detail was paramount, the team was able to ensure uninterrupted near-native support for their customers in all the local languages. With seamless multilingual support, their agents can more effectively address customer inquiries and resolve issues in a timely manner, leading to a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction metrics and improved employee experience and productivity. 

In the successful pilot run through the first year, the team has pushed approximately 40% of customer service email traffic through the Language IO process. The goal for the second year is to double this and add chat to the mix. 

With further use of Language IO, the Balsam Brands team expects an even deeper set of cost efficiencies: They project that Language IO could further lower the cost of multilingual support in France and Germany, bringing it more in line with the low costs to serve English-speaking geographies. 

Language IO enhances the operational flexibility and efficiency of Balsam Brands, significantly contributing to their ability to meet the evolving demands of their growing and dynamic business worldwide.

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