Sunday, May 31, 2026

How AboutYou scales buyer help round large retail spikes

At a look

  • Based: 2014, Hamburg, Germany
  • Serves over 12 million clients  
  • Provides help in 26 European markets and 25 languages

The problem

AboutYou, a number one digital vogue and life-style retailer, presents a variety of attire, equipment, and footwear to clients throughout a number of markets. Famend for its modern strategy to personalization, About You creates a extremely tailor-made purchasing expertise, setting a benchmark for e-commerce excellence. Nevertheless, providing personalised, on-time and on-brand help throughout European markets, whereas delivering on progress targets, isn’t any small activity.

Managing quantity spikes is a essential problem for any retailer, and in addition a key alternative to develop income. Whether or not spikes come from advertising campaigns, provider challenges, or the behemoth of Black Friday, AboutYou wanted a approach to scale customer support assets with out always hiring or incurring giant prices, whereas sustaining a constant, high quality help expertise.

“We persistently confronted the expensive problem of ramping up and down short-term assets for our campaigns. That is the place Unbabel got here into play, serving to us to flexibly allocate our present assets throughout markets which can be the main focus of those campaigns. Unbabel supplied fast, simple processes from implementation to agent coaching and gear utilization, making it an environment friendly answer for our wants.”

– René Fischer, Senior Buyer Service Controller & Product Admin

The answer

AboutYou chosen Unbabel’s AI-powered translation platform, combining machine and human translation to fulfill a wide range of high quality wants, to deal with this customer support progress problem. Unbabel was chosen for its capability to supply:

  • High quality: Unbabel’s high-quality translations ensures AboutYou maintains its dedication to offering glorious help – even throughout peak durations. 
  • Simplicity: Unbabel’s onboarding course of and integration into present programs like Zendesk are seamless, simplifying the implementation and agent coaching course of for AboutYou.
  • Companion Strategy: Unbabel’s mixture of devoted help, deep linguistic experience and creating tailor-made options to fulfill AboutYou’s particular wants confirmed the extent of funding into the connection.

The outcomes

By integrating Unbabel into Zendesk and progressively rolling out the answer throughout languages, AboutYou achieved important enhancements in its customer support operations:

  • Value Financial savings: Black Friday specifically is a problem in retail and ecommerce, and AboutYou was in a position to accrue financial savings within the six-figure vary throughout Black Friday by avoiding the necessity to rent and prepare extra customer support representatives.
  • Constant Efficiency: There was no unfavorable influence with Unbabel on KPIs like Service Degree Agreements (SLAs), Buyer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, dealing with occasions, or the general buyer expertise. 
  • Strengthened Companion Relations: AboutYou obtained optimistic suggestions from its outsourcing companions. The brand new flexibility let these companions cut back frequent staffing changes, enhancing stability and worker retention.

“Regardless of preliminary doubts, the device has confirmed to be extraordinarily user-friendly. The largest benefit is that ticket dealing with is hardly any completely different from the best way I’m used to dealing with tickets in my native language. The dealing with is intuitive and clean, in order that the workflow stays uninterrupted, and the device is fast and simple to make use of. Unbabel makes a big contribution to overcoming language limitations with out complicating the work course of.”

– AboutYou Buyer Assist Agent

Managing Spikes in Motion: Black Friday

Black Friday clearly demonstrates the flexibleness AboutYou enjoys with Unbabel. With large customer support spikes, AboutYou was in a position to rather more easily handle the quantity with out growing headcount. 

With Unbabel, AboutYou strategically deploys assets to deal with the early peaks in Romania and Bulgaria, the place Black Friday begins earlier. By deploying Unbabel-supported brokers to those spikes, AboutYou didn’t should recruit and prepare on brief discover. As quantity in Romania and Bulgaria subsided, however surged in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, AboutYou re-allocated these assets seamlessly, once more with out the churn of hiring and coaching. 

This flexibility permits AboutYou to efficiently handle the Black Friday surge with out having to rent extra workers. By shuffling the crew based mostly on capability, quite than language ability, they may keep away from a rise in FTEs within the mid double digits, and the related price of mid five-figures per FTE. This corresponding financial savings lets AboutYou invests the place it issues – within the buyer expertise.

Graph - Black Friday 2024, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Graph - Black Friday 2024, Romania and Bulgaria.

Unbabel’s AI-powered translation platform lets AboutYou effectively handle customer support operations, significantly in periods of excessive demand. By making their brokers multilingual, AboutYou can flexibly use assets to fulfill spikes wherever they’re, and help the companies income and advertising objectives, regardless of the market, whereas nonetheless assembly the excessive requirements of help and buyer expertise AboutYou has set. 

Trying to increase throughout markets or optimize your multilingual operations with on-brand high quality? Unbabel will help.

In regards to the Writer

Profile Photo of Chloé Andrews

Chloé Andrews

Chloé is Unbabel’s Product & Buyer Advertising Supervisor. She makes a speciality of enhancing buyer understanding of Unbabel’s merchandise and worth by means of focused messaging and strategic communication.

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