Stay in shape while enjoying food that tastes as good as it feels!

Founded in 2019, Shape Republic is a sport nutrition & health supplement brand for men & women produced in Germany, which provides delicious meal replacements that's fit for everyday life such as Slim Shakes! 

Its mission is to help you achieve your health and wellness goals (whether you want to lose or gain weight), with a diverse line of products designed to help you feel great about your body without feeling any guilt when you eat! Their product lines are characterized by the finest ingredients and crafted with great attention to detail by their chefs and nutritionists .

Today, Shape Republic offers up to 18 different recipes and already counts 300,000 customers  across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, UK, Netherlands, Spain…

Customer retention rate as #1 goal for the fitness food brand.

Shape Republic is usually associated with dieting by its consumers because of its name. As proof, their best-selling product is the slim shake!But it means their products are usually not consumed several times because when you are on a diet and finally reach your goal, you obviously do not want to keep this diet forever…

It has been vital for the Shape Republic business to keep a high customer retention by encouraging customers to use other products such as their health and fitness supplements  or snacks that can be consumed when staying in shape.

To promote their range of products, they have been working for a few years now with many influencers, from nano to influencers with +100k of followers, to develop its brand and product awareness in different markets. 

What are the main challenges faced by the customer care of Shape Republic?

Their customer care activity is mainly driven by their influencers with whom they are working with all year long (nano, macro and big influencers). The number one reason customers complain is usually about “promo codes not working”. So anything that is technical, or related to influencer posts where they cannot have much opportunity to influence their scope makes their customer support very busy.

Besides the most common demands, their customer support also needs to handle technical issues such as their E-shop or delivery requests, the brand receives a lot of product and health requests.

“We receive very specific questions about health and it’s very difficult for us. We want to provide the best answers so our consumers feel very valued, but we are not allowed to give any health recommendations and it’s not satisfying for a client to be redirected to a doctor for instance” explains Farina.

Also, the customer care team cannot know everything about Shape Republic products, so they usually need to escalate the requests to the product team and developers.

“Number 1 request from our clients is to have phone support, but we thought it was not a great idea because a major part of the requests are related to the products explanations or personal health guidance and we don’t want to have an agent on the phone who cannot answer these questions”.  Emails or social media are the only channels activated by the brand to avoid escalations or multiple recontacts but of course, in some cases, clients are being called back when it seems necessary to handle their issues.

How has Shape Republic been able to scale up its customer care in no time with Onepilot while keeping their high standards?

Farina Schiffner, Director of operations and product at Shape Republic, is in charge of a customer experience manager who handles different customer care channels and manages their social media.

Shape Republic also used to have an international team for Italy & France, composed of working students or interns. Their missions could go from social media community management to answering client demands by emails and managing influencer relations. They needed a lot of training and explanations before they could be autonomous in their tasks. However, if they were not trained enough it could cause reputational damage if they did not reply on time, properly, or simply did not stick to the guidelines. 

“They usually stayed 3 to 6 months and then they were off to graduate or study somewhere else, so it was tough to manage as we needed to spend time training the newcomers each time”.

Scaling customer care with external expert agents within 2 weeks and capitalise on their training

Staffing its customer care is always a big challenge for any company. Will I have enough volume to handle? How much is it going to cost? Shape Republic wanted to find professional staff but could not afford to hire permanent positions and did not want to take any financial risks as it is still hard to predict the business when you are in a new market.

That’s why they decided to outsource their customer care with Onepilot in March 2022.

It only took 2 weeks between signing the contract and the first answers provided to their customers by the external agents. Onepilot handles all of the recruiting, hiring, and training of Shape Republic agents who are customer care experts, so the brand never has to deal with multiple training sessions anymore.

“We started to send our most recurrent and simpler requests to Onepilot agents so they could get used to our use cases and it also gave us time to understand how to work with an external provider. The more we were working on the knowledge base, the easiest it was for us to transfer new tickets to the agents. Also, Zendesk being integrated to Onepilot’s platform is very helpful for the agents as they do not have to use multiple channels to answer our clients, every demand is gathered on the same tool!”.

Today, Onepilot agents handle all the brand’s tickets, answering to their clients on common requests such as delivery, technical issues or return of orders, but also manage Truspilot reviews.

Offer a high quality of service thanks to a tailor-made knowledge base and a proprietary quality check grid

Providing consistent, high-quality service throughout the customer journey increases customer retention. So it’s just as important for a brand to offer fast, accurate answers to the clients.

Shape Republic worked on its own knowledge base with its dedicated Operation Manager which is accessible on the Onepilot platform whenever they want. The tone of voice, the ticketing tools and every use case and process Onepilot’s agents need to handle are covered on the platform, so they can be totally autonomous to reply to the customer requests. 

Thanks to the quality check grid provided by Onepilot, Shape Republic makes sure the agents reply with the same brand standards. “Tracking agents' performance and commenting on their responses to help them improve is very easy on Onepilot platform”. 

The target was to answer within 24hrs maximum to their clients but with Onepilot, they can expect to get one within 2 hours except during week-ends, as their customer care is turned off.

“Also, having access to a performance dashboard on Onepilot’s platform helps a lot of company understanding their KPI’s and improving their knowledge base and internal processes”.

Final words of Farina Schiffner, Director of Operations & Product at Shape Republic

The onboarding was really super fast and easy and the overall collaboration has been very positive!  Onepilot’s team is always very helpful and responsive, friendly and communicative. I think what matters the most is that everybody is willing to do their best to comply with our standards which is very important and reassuring for us! 

Don't wait until you are overwhelmed with requests! Like Shape Republic, trust Onepilot to outsource your customer support. Onepilot offers you a fast, flexible and easy-to-implement solution to quickly scale your teams. We guarantee 100% human and qualitative answers managed by our native agents. Contact us now for a demo here.