Raddish Kids + Zendesk: Increased conversions and a connected remote team

When people started spending more time at home in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they found more time to cook with their families. That shift brought big changes to Raddish Kids, a cooking club for children. What had been a steadily growing service suddenly became a surprise hit—and with that success came new customer support challenges.

Raddish Kids is an experiential subscription kit focused on teaching the culinary arts to kids ages 4–14. Each month, kits with new culinary themes land on doorsteps, and adults get an email with the shopping list prior to delivery.

These kits not only help kids develop new cooking skills and confidence in the kitchen, but the entire family builds memories together as part of the experience. And the experience doesn’t stay in the kitchen. Customer Service and Retention Manager Jennifer Buchanan points to the company’s dedication to a great customer experience.

“The customer service portion of our business is essential. It’s really a focus,” Buchanan said. “We’re really passionate about creating a community and making sure that our members are heard and responded to, but also that their communications are seamless, so that they can spend most of their time focusing on the experience at home instead of communicating with us.”

A move to remote work brings big changes

That surge in growth brought a surge in support tickets—nearly doubling the previous year. The customer service team also grew, and adding remote employees meant procedural changes. “Our team members offer a lot of help: recipe troubleshooting, looking for tracking, account management, and more,” Buchanan said. “But once we all moved home, we had to adjust because the majority of our team have small children at home with us. We had to pull our focus from live phone to chat so we could have the immediacy of response time, but less background noise.”

The team also relied on data from Zendesk to integrate all the changes. “Having the data to predict ticket volume and inquiry type was key for having the right people at the right time, especially because our team grew 40 percent after we all started working from home,” Buchanan said.

Remote work, connected team with Zendesk

As Raddish Kids business built new workflows from a distance, the customer support team also needed to adapt. When everyone shifted gears to working remotely with different schedules, the team went from being a little group in an office with constant in-person communication to a distanced team with staggered hours. In spite of the challenges, Raddish Kids found new effectiveness with Zendesk.

“The fact that we can set up different views in Zendesk, and that all our platforms are connected has really helped,” Buchanan said. “We can also pass chats back and forth, which almost replicates how we would handle phones in the office. So that helps us stay connected in real time.”

Intuitive, easy to use, and hard to outgrow

Beyond helping the support team stay connected, Zendesk also helped the company build a conversation history for members in order to build real relationships. Because all customer interactions are centralized, team members have the whole picture as they help customers. “We’re really focused on not becoming just a call center,” said Buchanan.

Meanwhile, Buchanan’s team found Zendesk intuitive and easy to use. It helped with onboarding new agents, especially for remote worky, and offered a great balance between the Zendesk levels of service and the dynamic needs of the business. “It can really help getting your foot in the door early on when your company is small, and then growing alongside each other,” she said. “I don’t think we could ever outgrow Zendesk because there are so many options and integrations.”

Integrations, information, and increased conversion

Because Raddish Kids provides a unique product that is often given as a gift, the support team fields inquiries from both purchasers and recipients, which are often disconnected. That means the support team relies on Zendesk integrations with commerce platform apps like Shopify and Chargify to serve customers and offer them time-sensitive transactional or technical support.

“The integrations with Shopify and Chargify are really helpful because we can quickly figure out what orders are associated with the person who is reaching out,” said Buchanan. And with everything integrated, 85 percent of tickets are resolved in a single touch. For Raddish Kids, offering effective online support is an important part of sustaining long-term relationships with customers.

Data from Zendesk helps the Raddish customer service team not only stay aligned with its goals but also to make key decisions.

“It’s been great to have the tools to pull the data, to reinforce any hunches we may have. In our Monday meetings, we look at the amount of tickets we processed in the past week, as well as volume per ticket type,” Buchanan said. “Keeping an eye on trends and volume not only helped us front-load our agent staffing for a big rush, but it has also shaped how we communicate with customers everywhere. We can isolate any confusion on the website, or possible shipping concerns, or really batch type the inquiries. We push everything forward for our CEO to be aware of every facet of the company that people are talking about. We love to push forward all the great feedback. Our team is really well heard within the company.”

Ultimately, the positive feedback about the customer service team showed up in some impressive numbers: Since using Zendesk and growing the team, conversion rates have improved by 50 percent. “It’s been an interesting pivot for our team in processing volume quickly—while still having that personal touch, which is also part of the reason why we upgraded our platform to include voice and a better chat experience,” Buchanan said. “I think that people will continue that digital focus.”