How HydraPak Optimized Their RMA Process to Save Time and Money
Earth is 28% land, 72% water and 100% of it is meant to be explored. As weekend warriors we push ourselves to hike, bike, climb, ski and get outside in the name of adventure and fitness. This requires the ambition to set goals, the dedication to test our limits, and the determination to push through them. It also requires hydration – lots and lots of hydration.
Just as adventurers have pushed themselves to new heights and expeditions, HydraPak has pushed to relentlessly create better hydration solutions for performance driven people. Whether it’s a simple refinement or inventing a whole new category, HydraPak has redefined the future of hydration for almost two decades.
HydraPak differentiates itself in the market as an innovator and by the quality of its hydration products. From flexible bottles and soft flasks to wearable reservoirs – HydraPak products are intelligently designed for all types of adventurers and built to last.
Incredible Growth Brings New Opportunities
As HydraPak’s products have grown, so has its business. With a fast growing direct store-front and an expanding network of over 50 OEM partnerships including outdoor companies and backpack manufacturers – demand for HydraPak products is higher than ever.
Given their rapid growth and the complexities of fulfillment through a partner channel, it was important for HydraPak to have the right tools to ensure a consistently great experience for customers and partners. This included finding the right CRM to effectively manage these evolving relationships. In 2017 HydraPak turned to Zendesk which provided an elegant way to manage their customer relationships across their direct and partner channels.
As they grew their business on Zendesk, HydraPak continued to add to its software suite to better empower their team. While these platforms filled critical gaps, and provided valuable tools for fulfilling customer requests, it also introduced added complexity for their support organization. One particularly complex and common challenge was warranty fulfillment.
Georgiy Patrikeyev, a Senior Engineer at HydraPak in charge of OEM, explains, “as the business grew our needs for customer service, especially warranty fulfillment, has grown and the requirements have become more difficult.”
As part of the warranty fulfillment process, agents needed to leave the support ticket and navigate back and forth between browser tabs to view, copy and paste information between Zendesk and ShipStation. These manual steps not only took a significant amount of time but also introduced new challenges of data entry errors and needing to learn multiple platforms to complete a single request. Over time, this was costing significant time and money.
Finding the Right Solution
Given the cost of these manual processes, HydraPak searched for a more streamlined approach. As Lexi Elmore, Warranty & Inventory Control Specialist at HydraPak, explains “Before BrightReps we spent about 6 months looking for a suitable solution, which is forever in business time.” This discovery process included researching different integration vendors and time spent trying to build an interim solution in-house.
Upon learning about BrightReps through a webinar, Patrikeyev and Elmore were immediately intrigued by the potential to streamline some of their more complex processes by creating integrated workflows and making them available right from the support ticket. As Elmore elaborates, “being able to streamline the process of creating an order for our warranty customers was an obvious benefit for us”.
What set BrightReps apart besides their product? The initial experience working with the BrightReps team.
“Their personal touch was really refreshing after all the barriers to entry we got from other integration companies wanting to charge by the hour to reinvent the wheel,” Elmore explains. “Finding a company that wants to drill down into what’s useful for us rather than wasting time, energy, and significant money upselling a solution we don’t need, or requiring a team to code was a win for our team.”
After downloading BrightReps Sidekick from the Zendesk App Marketplace, HydraPak was already well on their way to an optimized solution. As Elmore describes, “We were able to get this up and running within a month of finding BrightReps which was huge for us – being able to find an elegant and streamlined solution without costing us arms and legs.”
By using the ShipStation integrations available on the BrightReps integrations library, HydraPak was able to optimize their warranty fulfillment process in a shorter time and at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Better yet, there was no upfront cost, code or development required.
In addition to being easy to setup, HydraPak was impressed with how easy it was to use Sidekick as an agent on Zendesk. “It was very intuitive,” Patrikeyev adds, “I didn’t need to ask for any help and within minutes I was going through tickets faster”.
How Does Their Solution Work?
Using BrightReps Sidekick on Zendesk, HydraPak agents can see a customer’s order status, relevant customer and product information, and create replacement orders via ShipStation at the click of a button – all without leaving the ticket. When updates are made such as status changes or verifying the customer information, this information updates both Zendesk and ShipStation via Sidekick. As Elmore explains “Prior to Sidekick I wasted a lot of time switching between windows and copying and pasting. Everything is now in one place and it’s so much easier to complete a task.”
After automating their warranty fulfillment workflow with such success, HydraPak is already looking forward to building out more integrated workflows including the ability to generate return labels and create quality records in a Quality Management System.
While many products promote time savings – BrightReps Sidekick changes how agents work by creating a tangibly faster and better agent experience. “It was unexpected just how much time we could save,” Elmore reiterates. “I’m able to fulfill these requests in about 30 seconds rather than 3 minutes. Over time, the amount of clicks I’m saving really add up.”
By creating a more streamlined agent experience, BrightReps enables HydraPak to spend more time focused on what matters most – keeping their customers happy and hydrated. Elmore explains, “By saving time responding to issues it allows us to invest time collecting data to help track and prevent quality issues in the future.” This proactive approach to support and their commitment to product quality is one of the many things that differentiates HydraPak and their customer first approach.
