Koala personifies forward-thinking, entrepreneurial young business. A young start-up based in Sydney, Australia, they specialise in disrupting the furniture industry with their use of innovative technology, environmental consciousness and exceptional customer service.

“This makes for a recipe for success in a world of instant gratification. With an international team of 76 that is rapidly growing we aim to continue to challenge the status quo, to better the environment and to keep our customers surprised and delighted.”

Problem

“One of Koala’s most characteristic traits is that we move fast, for everything. Moving fast is great and is part of our success, but it is also our biggest challenge because we have to make sure communication, knowledge and systems are all up to date simultaneously. It’s very time consuming but it is necessary to ensure our success.”

According to Koala making sure you close your customers’ feedback loop is also challenging time-wise, but taking the time to understand and share your customers feedback across the company is paramount. “We love feedback, positive or negative: it allows us to identify where our strengths are, but as importantly, it allows us to be ahead of the curve by fixing what irritate our customers straight away.”

Solution

Nicereply helped Koala by providing a platform for customers to be honest and forthcoming about what they liked and what they didn’t like. “The sheer volume of feedback has increased, which gives us more data and a clearer picture of how we are going. Before Nicereply, feedback was less frequent -often when they were either very happy or very disappointed, and this was often long after the initial customer interaction.”

Now more and more Koala’s customers are offering feedback and suggestions and that information is stored and recorded automatically.

“We use Nicereply everyday and for everything.” All Koala’s customer support staff have a log-in and feedback is available to everyone with a Nicereply access. Nothing is private and because they work well as a team, all feedback can be seen by everyone.

“We also widely use our feedback internally with other teams to make sure they are aware of what our customers think of our website, our courier partners, our payment gateways….”

“We also share feedback and NPS/CES score in front of the whole company every week during our company-wide “town hall”.

Customer feedback is one of the backbones of Koala. “In fact, a major part of our rapid success is our customer reviews, without these 15,000+ 5 star reviews we would not be where we are today. Customer feedback is crucial to our growth – we firmly believe our customers should feel heard throughout their koala experience.”

“Having a direct to consumer business model, we’re able to track every customer touch point from the very first brand interaction to asking additional feedback months after purchase.“ Collecting such customer behaviour not only improves future marketing campaigns and targeting, it also allows Koala to monitor every touch point along the customer journey making sure it delivers on the brand promise.

“Being a data-driven organisation, we’re not only able to collect and analyse marketing data at real-time for budget shifting and optimisation, but we’re also able to get a constant feedback loop from customers to make sure we’re always delivering on our brand promise of being a customer centric brand.”

When asked why did they choose Nicereply for collecting customer feedback, Koala said: “It was an easy choice! Nicereply is providing us many customer satisfaction metrics (we use NPS and CES) under the same platform, which was very important to us. It’s compatible with Zendesk and we were able to customise our surveys, in line with Koala’s branding and markets (we have one in English and another in Japanese running in parallel).”

Koala’s Corporate Culture

It’s also very important to stay up-to-date on trends in today’s continually changing market and buyer’s preferences, but Koala’s employees are constantly encouraged to come up with their own creative ideas.

“We have a team of designers, creatives and innovators whose job it is to constantly keep ahead of the market. Not only that, but we make sure that everyone who works for us is given the opportunity to put forward ideas.”

Koala’s customer support team are at the centre of Koala and are highly valued and respected. “All of them are empowered to do what they want as long as our customers are happy at the end of the day. They are always involved (and often initiate) changes to adapt and evolve the way we deliver the best experience possible.”

One of the biggest risks for a customer support team is to be cut off from the other functions in the company. “At Koala, we ask our support team to spend time with other departments so they can share and exchange on different topics/projects by bringing with them the “voice” of our customers.”

Ben Cadenel also said: “My best advice would be to put your customer service team at the centre of your organisation; they have the voice of your customers and know them better than anyone else. Having great products is not sufficient and the service you provide becomes what your customers talk about to become your best sales team by sharing their experience and recommending your company to their friends and family members.”

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