Founded in 2014, Japan Crate curates and delivers an assortment of Japanese candies to a growing international customer base. While it transformed from a mere subscription box into a monthly cultural experience, the brand faced challenges in maintaining high-quality customer service as its popularity grew.
Challenge: Rapid growth led to an overwhelming volume of support requests
The growth of Japan Crate led to slow response and resolution times in customer service, causing dissatisfaction, customer churn, and negative social media feedback.
Japan Crate knew that a poor customer experience can wreck a subscription-based business, so they set off to achieve four goals:
- Delivering world-class customer service
- Maintaining a lean team
- Guaranteeing a timely, perfect experience
- Providing 24/7 support
Solution: Siena AI and Gorgias to the improve automation rate and response times
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To achieve these goals, Japan Crate integrated Gorgias with Siena AI an empathetic chatbot powered by AI. Additionally, they integrated Gorgias with both of these tools to bring subscription information into the helpdesk and automate all subscription-related inquiries. One major advantage of this integration was multilingual support, allowing Japan Crate to automate customer service responses in multiple languages, including Japanese.

Results: A major transformation in customer service
The results were transformative. In just 30 days, response times dropped from 12 hours to 15 minutes, and resolution times from a full day to a mere 2 hours.
The power of automation through Siena AI and Gorgias was significant, as it enabled a 41% automation rate for order and subscription-related inquiries within 90 days. The integration with Recharge also allowed seamless automation of subscription-related queries.
In addition to managing English-speaking customers, the multilingual feature helped cater to their Japanese or French-speaking followers and other non-English speakers, broadening Japan Crate's customer service capabilities.

What's next for Japan Crate?
Inspired by these significant improvements, Japan Crate plans to explore further potential uses of Siena and Gorgias. They aim to delve deeper into multichannel automation, ensuring an even smoother customer experience, and further use of the multilingual feature to reach more international customers.
This case study is a testament to the transformative power of AI and smart customer service platforms in enhancing customer experience. The collaboration between Japan Crate, Siena AI, and Gorgias, with the added capability of Recharge, has not only improved their customer service metrics significantly but also expanded their service capabilities to different languages, setting a precedent for the subscription-box industry.