How Vuori Scaled Its Customer Service Team With Aircall
California-born brand Vuori makes premium performance apparel inspired by the integration of fitness, surf, sport, and art. Empowering everyone to live an extraordinary life is a core tenet of Vuori’s mission—it's committed to not only building fantastic experiences for customers through standout products but also nurturing thriving teams at the company.
To discover how Aircall has supported the business as it scales around the globe, we spoke with Chad Warren, Vuori’s Senior Manager of Customer Service.
Building the Foundations of a Winning Customer Service Team
When Chad first started his role at Vuori, the company was much smaller than it is today. He didn’t lead a customer service team—he was the customer service team.
“When we first started out, it was just me, my phone, and an email inbox! It didn’t take long to realize we’d soon need new tools and support—it was my ambition to scale our team and deliver incredible experiences for our customers,” Chad says.
As Vuori’s operation thrived and the volume of calls grew, Chad knew he needed more hands on deck, alongside tools that could scale with the business. While Vuori initially outsourced support to a third-party company, Chad was building plans to bring the team in-house when they had the resource available. With that ambition on the horizon, he wanted a solution that would make the eventual switch seamless—which led him to Aircall.
Aircall stood out thanks to its seamless scaling, with new teams added in a matter of clicks, and its intuitive IVR that simplified directing calls to the third-party support team he enlisted. A further highlight was the ease with which Vuori could transition to an in-house team once ready, without impacting the support infrastructure they’d created with Aircall.
Chad explains, “Being able to eventually move our support team in-house was essential for us. By choosing Aircall, I knew that when we were ready to make that change, moving the support structure in-house would be as simple as flicking a switch.”
Fast-forward to today and Chad’s made good on his plans to move support in-house with Aircall. His team is now almost 50-strong, located in both the U.S. and Vuori’s Mexico-based warehouse. The impact has been profound, with Chad noticing a clear uptick in customer satisfaction thanks to the support team’s voice calls.
“Since we switched to Aircall, our average CSAT has gone up 4%, which is fantastic. Phone calls are a big contributor to that because so many people want to be able to have those meaningful interactions and connect with a real person when they have a query.”
Keeping the Service Team’s Tools Connected
Alongside the ease with which Aircall could scale to Vuori’s evolving needs, Chad and the team also find its suite of integrations invaluable. One of the most important for Vuori is the integration with its CRM, Kustomer.
By uniting Aircall and Kustomer, call data from Aircall is automatically synced into a caller’s Kustomer timeline—which contains a clear history of every customer interaction, including calls, emails, purchases, and more. Back when calls were being handled by a third-party team, this meant Chad and the team had instant visibility of those interactions and where they fit within each customer’s experience with the company.
“Being able to integrate Aircall with Kustomer is a game changer. If a customer ordered in August, called in September, and emailed in October, we can trace all of that in one place. It empowers our agents to take ownership over those tickets and deliver a great experience for customers by keeping all of their interactions connected,” says Chad.
Within Aircall itself, Vuori’s team can also delve into reporting and call center analytics in more detail—helping create a clear understanding of successes, trends, and challenges, which they can use to further improve service.
Creating Extraordinary Experiences for Customers and Agents
While each support agent is focused on delivering a brilliant experience for customers, Vuori’s also committed to ensuring those agents themselves have a great experience at work.
To improve how the team learns from one another and shares knowledge, they take advantage of Aircall’s call whispering and warm transfer features. Call whispering enables more experienced veterans to listen in on new agents’ calls and share advice with them in real-time without the customer being aware—helping every service agent at Vuori build meaningful customer interactions from day one.
“Call whispering is really important for our new agents who might be less experienced with phone interactions, as it gives them the opportunity to learn from our team and build confidence,” Chad adds.
Warm transfer meanwhile allows agents to choose to briefly speak to one another before they transfer a call—providing a quick opportunity to share useful context, driving better solutions and faster resolutions for the customer.
And when customers do need to be placed on hold, Vuori likes to add a little fun to the experience—using the Jeopardy theme for the hold music or holiday music during the festive season.
Alongside these helpful tools, Chad was also drawn to Aircall’s engaging user interface. The look and feel of the app and its uniformity across the Mac and iPhone devices Vuori uses means working on Aircall is a pleasure. Meanwhile, learning how the tool works is intuitive for new users.
Expanding Customer Service Into New Regions & Increasing Availability
As Vuori continues to grow, Chad and the team will be scaling their support across regions and in new languages. They’re also looking to widen the availability of phone support over the weekends.
“For a smaller but growing business like ours, Aircall has been the perfect match for our service needs—it’s been ready to scale alongside us every step of the way. Thanks to Aircall, I know we can seamlessly build our customer service as our business evolves and enters new markets,” Chad says.
With easily adjustable service hours and the ability to create new international numbers with local area codes, Aircall will be ready to support Chad and the Vuori team as they bring extraordinary experiences to new customers around the world.