Last Updated on June 9, 2023 by Tony Fowler
Today we’re talking with Richard Kelsey. Richard is a director at Beer Cartel and Brewquets, and a Board Member at Retail Drinks Australia. He’s also a Top 50 person in Aus Ecommerce. Beer Cartel has been with Re:amaze since 2019 and we’re excited to have them share their experience!
R: Beer! Who doesn’t love a cold brew? So go ahead, tell us about Beer Cartel! What should we know?
BC: Beer Cartel (www.beercartel.com.au) is an award-winning craft beer retailer that stocks over 1,000 of the best craft beers from Australia and internationally. It was started in 2009 with the intention of making great beer available to Australian drinkers, showing that there was much more to the world of beer than the very limited range that was available at every bar and bottleshop.
Beer Cartel has been featured by Smart Company during the COVID-19 pandemic! Here’s what they had to say or read for yourself.
“Absolutely crazy”: Beer Cartel sales skyrocket as Aussies look online for booze amid coronavirus lockdowns
Beer Cartel is also the recipient of the Australia Post Online Retail Industry Award for best online marketing! Read about it here.
Here’s a description from Beer Cartel’s About Us page:
We started Beer Cartel in 2009 with a dream: to provide beer drinkers with access to amazing beer from Australia and overseas and to open people’s minds to what beer really is.
The sights, the aromas, the flavours and the stories; we wanted to showcase it all.
Operating out of a tiny Kennards Storage Shed, Beer Cartel started as a monthly beer subscription delivered to your door. Each month we used to take over the entire temperature controlled wine storage area at Kennards as we packed hundreds of boxes.
It was exciting times, but we wanted to do more and in 2011 opened our Sydney store. If you are Sydney based or travelling come say g’day; we’re at 9/87 Reserve Rd, Artarmon.
R: What was your customer support process like before? What have you realized that needs to change?
BC: Beer Cartel had no support solution in place, we had looked at different alternatives but found nothing that was super intuitive, that worked across channels and that had a great helpdesk platform.
We were busy using and shuffling inside and out of Gmail to manage inquiries and a simple FAQ page on the website – this translated to huge inefficiencies and our lovely customers weren’t really being looked after. We wanted and needed to change this situation which ultimately led us on our search.
R: During this search for the right tool, what did your team pay attention to? What was priority #1?
BC: We had some simple needs to fill:
- Have a great helpdesk portal where customers could look after themselves
- Be able to manage both email and Facebook Messenger inquiries in one place
- Be able to handle on-site chat messages plus emails
- Create a ticketing system so that customer issues could be tracked and addressed
- Make it so that all staff had visibility on customer inquiries so that it wasn’t just found in one shared Gmail inbox
We did some shopping around and ultimately came across Re:amaze and once we found it could do what we wanted, we quickly saw that Re:amaze could do so much more. It seemed like it could be the ultimate answer for us and luckily, it was.
We’ve now got two businesses, Beer Cartel and Brewquets, using Re:amaze across 3 websites; 2 powered by Shopify and 1 powered by BigCommerce.
R: So how are things now that you’re using Re:amaze on a daily basis? What changes have you witnessed? Care to share?
BC: We realized very quickly that Re:amaze was increasing our efficiencies significantly. This is something we haven’t experienced in the past! The helpdesk FAQ portal and FAQ in the chat interface meant that customers were able to find a solution themselves for a large number of cases, and when inquiries did come through it was now much easier to address them and handle them much faster.
Not long after we had Re:amaze set up we had a product recall which affected 3,600 customers. This type of incident would have otherwise been a massive headache! Fortunately with Re:amaze, we were able to address customer concerns and issues quickly and efficiently, leading to many positive customer reviews and lots of kind notes about how well we handled the recall.
R: Alright, we don’t usually like to talk too much about numbers since every business is different but if you had to give out one significant number about how Re:amaze has helped you, what would that be?
BC: Re:amaze has reduced our response time by over at least 50% which meant we could handle over 3 times as many inquiries in the same time as it previously took us to handle just 1.
R: Any parting comments?
BC: Re:amaze really is the complete helpdesk and support solution for any eCommerce business. It’s a must have.