Since 1916 the Finnish shoe brand Karhu has been a definition in the world of running. For decades Karhu – meaning ‘bear’ in Finnish – dominated the running tracks. In addition to its strong running offering, Karhu also made a name as a lifestyle sneaker brand, selling its sneakers all over the world both through resellers as well as their direct-to-consumer channel. To offer their online customers the same experience as they would receive in-store, Karhu is working with the customer care fashion team of Salesupply.

Outsourcing to improve the customer service experience

“We have been working with Salesupply for a little over 6 years now”, says Timon van den Berg, ecommerce manager at Karhu. “When we started working with the fashion team of Salesupply we were already experiencing strong online growth. Since Karhu is run with a small organization we did not have the resources to maintain a good service level, so outsourcing our customer service to an external provider was absolutely necessary.”

“Both the integration of the systems as well as the training of the customer service team went fast and smooth. We outsourced our B2C customer service to Salesupply. Their service agents take care of all requests that come in per mail and phone. We decided to set up native support teams for our US, German, Finish and Dutch markets. All other markets do have local contact numbers and are attended by a central Salesupply team in English.”

Customer service response time

“Directly from the start it was clear we needed a bigger, dedicated customer care team. The agents of Salesupply managed to drastically reduce response times and did so in a correct customer friendly way.”

Continuous improvement of customer experience

“Recently we released our new website karhu.com which is – even more than before – fully designed to give our customers the best customer experience. In addition to the new website, we introduced a renewed focus on improving the customer experience organisationwide. The insights created by the Customer Service team play a crucial role. That’s why we frequently brainstorm with Salesupply to integrate the information we get from customer service even further and to turn it into a cycle of continuous organisational improvements,” Timon explains.

B2C ecommerce customer service fully outsourced to Salesupply
Jonathon Jay Huggett

Jonathon Huggett