How Mabel’s Labels Achieved a 93 CSAT Score while Reducing Support Volume by 58%

Challenge: The Mabel’s Labels service team was struggling to keep up with growing sales every year. Manual processes and multiple tools kept the team from getting ahead. They couldn’t grow or improve the service department’s performance, and they struggled to track feedback and quantify customer concerns for the company. 

Solution: With Help Scout, Mabel's Labels consolidated all support activity into one tool and doubled their productivity. Using all of Help Scout’s products, they’ve driven a 122% increase in help article visits and reduced email volume by 58%, all while maintaining a CSAT score above 90. Their service team is able to stay lean and keep up with growing sales while adapting to seasonal influxes in demand. 

For 20 years, Mabel’s Labels has been the leading provider of personalized kids’ labels to families across North America. They started with durable, personalized labels and have grown their product line to include water bottle bands, allergy and medical alert products, sports tags, household labels, and seasonal items. With a growing customer base, seasonal demand shifts, and an expanding list of products to support, their support team faces a unique challenge. We spoke with Eryn Chesney, manager of CX, about how Help Scout has helped them level up and meet their customers’ support needs.

The challenge: Keeping up with growing sales volume

Mabel’s Labels’ service team was using Outlook and Zapier for email and live chat respectively. As sales volume increased, they felt the shortcomings of using separate tools that weren’t geared toward support. Resolution times were tough to maintain and they didn’t have the ability to track customer concerns and issues over time. Eryn said, “Before adopting Help Scout, the service team was just coping but never growing or improving the department’s capabilities or their impact on other teams within the business.” It was time to invest in a proper customer support tool.

The solution: Bringing all customer support into Help Scout

There were three main reasons Eryn outlined for why they chose Help Scout:

1. It’s an all-in-one solution for email, chat, and help articles. 

2. It’s affordable for their budget-lean team.

3. Its user-friendly and intuitive interface is easy for seasonal staff to learn and navigate. 

“Help Scout has become the heart and soul of all our customer support needs,” Eryn said. “Our service team uses it all day, every day to answer customer emails, interact with customers via live chat, manage our FAQs, and create critical on-site messages when they’re needed for things like technical difficulties, out-of-stock items, or production delays.”

Eryn’s team can tell Help Scout is made for small and medium-sized businesses like Mabel’s Labels. Their regular employee count of 50 balloons to 85 during the busy summer season, so it was paramount to have a tool that new team members could learn quickly. Eryn said, “The fact that we can easily add and remove users based on the needs of our service team made Help Scout a really practical solution in comparison with the other support tools available.”

The result: Doubled productivity and 93 CSAT score

Eryn noted, “Our sales volume has significantly grown each year as well as our product offering, but we have been able to continually operate as a lean service team with low costs because of the efficiencies Help Scout has allowed for. This has resulted in our customer experience team being able to double their productivity since pre-adoption.”

As Eryn walked us through their use of Help Scout, she mentioned that they utilize every single product Help Scout offers. One of her major priorities after joining the team was to research and drive adoption of all the tools available to them. This brought immediate benefits to the team.

Reducing support volume by 58% with Beacon and Docs

Of all the things Help Scout allows her team to accomplish, Eryn said giving her team the ability to lower support volume through self-service, even as sales have increased, is number one.

Giving customers a great experience through rising demand is a constant challenge for support teams. By using Docs and Beacon together to create and distribute help articles answering common questions, the Mabel’s Labels team has been able to guide customers to the answers they need before they reach out to support for help. 

Eryn raved, “Over the last two years, with improvements to our Beacon and our Docs, our FAQ visits have increased by 122%, while our email volume has actually decreased by 58%!”

Using custom fields and reporting to track product feedback

Before Help Scout, Eryn’s team wasn’t equipped to understand trends in issues affecting their customers or provide feedback to the larger organization about them. By setting up specific reports assisted by custom fields, her team’s learnings have become a key part of larger customer experience initiatives: “Using custom fields and reports has become an integral part of all our larger CX initiatives throughout the company, like our Voice of Customer program. Any feedback reports we provide to other departments helps guide what improvements or changes our teams prioritize.”

Eryn’s team sets up specific custom fields to track friction points in their customer experience. These friction points could be a bad user experience on their website or a product complaint. By tracking these issues in conversations, she is able to estimate each issue’s impact on the broader business and strengthen their Voice of Customer reports. All of this helps other departments prioritize changes to the product or website based on real customer feedback. Plus, once the changes are in place, they can track the lowering volume of complaints via the same custom field to show tangible improvement. 

Centralizing all the service team’s work with integrations

It takes a village (of software tools) to run an ecommerce brand effectively. When talking directly with customers, having all their information on hand makes for a faster, more accurate service experience. It also makes the service team’s workday easier. That 100% productivity increase Eryn mentioned? Integrations were a key piece in driving day-to-day improvements by centralizing everything into Help Scout: “We have especially valued the native integrations. Last year we were able to bring responses to NPS and CES, our product reviews, and our customer order info right into our Help Scout inbox,” Eryn said. “This brought all of our team’s work into one central spot. It’s been a game changer for their processes and efficiency.”

Making support your competitive edge

There’s a reason Mabel’s Labels has continued to grow over the past 20 years in one of the most competitive industries: They have innovated both their products and their service to match the needs of the day. We’re glad to be a part of the industry-leading customer support that Eryn’s team provides. 

Eryn has recommended Help Scout to many other business peers because it has enabled Mabel’s Labels to provide the quality support they're looking for to give them a competitive edge in the ecommerce landscape.

If you’re an ecommerce brand looking to make support your competitive edge, try Help Scout today. Our 15-day free trial is risk free, and our (also industry-leading) support team is always here to help get you started.