“We have a Ferrari, but we’re just using it to drive down the road to buy some milk.” This was the analogy Luke Wallace used when he first dug into The Cotton On Group’s online customer service team’s use of Zendesk.

The team had been using Zendesk for nearly three years to provide email support to the nine brands that fall under The Cotton On Group. But with requests coming in around the clock, and without visibility into what other teams were doing, the team was neck deep in inquiries from the different brands and regions, and it was challenging to make improvements.

Wallace, a digital product manager, explained, “We already had a really good, fast car, but we needed to learn to drive it appropriately, and to start using all the functionality that is available.”

Established more than 23 years ago, The Cotton On Group now employs 20,000 people and operates over 1,300 retail stores internationally, in addition to their online business. Along the way, it made sense to separate customer service between the in-store and online experiences, and to move tickets between support teams around the world, chasing the sun. But today the company faces the same challenge as other major retailers: how to unify information in real-time across stores, platforms, corporate departments, and vast geographic distances.

That’s why The Cotton On Group decided to expand their use of Zendesk to more departments—across the U.S., Australia, and Singapore. It’s a perfect example of ‘cottoning on’—which means to understand or discover the potential of a great idea, exactly what the company’s brands are all about.

To that end, they became early adopters of Zendesk’s Multibrand feature. While each Cotton On Group brand maintains autonomy, especially when it comes to their social media support, being able to manage multiple brands through a single instance of Zendesk has allowed for a more uniform customer experience.

“We’ve had to review our structure and our definitions of customer service,” Wallace explained. The reality of today’s landscape is that for every one customer, there are multiple teams they’ll interact with. That’s why the company is actively aligning their teams to respond to “any customer, anytime, anyhow,” with extra emphasis on being able to quickly respond in the channel the customer used. They’ve found that being attentive to social media has been key, but also that each brand’s demographics—and social channel of choice—are very different.

Returning to the Ferrari analogy, no one drives a Ferrari like an expert without a few lessons, or at least a lot of practice.

“Zendesk has been really easy to use and the team easy to work with,” Wallace said. “I can ring up our account manager at any time and he’s always good for a chat. The time he’s spent getting us up and running has paid dividends in improving our customer service experience.”

For more information, visit the Zendesk Retail Page.