Castañer was born in 1927, when Luis Castañer and Tomas Serra opened the first workshop in Bañolas town. 

Few years later, Luis and his wife took over the management of the business and made the company popular by creating, in 1970, the first wedge espadrilles with Yves Saint Laurent.  

From that moment on, Castañer was present on the great fashion catwalks and a lot of famous people, like Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dalí, Diana de Gales and Penelope Cruz, started using its products. 

In 1994, Castañer opened its first single-brand store in Barcelona, followed by Paris, Saint Tropez, Madrid and Tokio. 

Today, the company celebrates its 90th anniversary with 1030 stores: 30 single-brand, 1000 multi-brand and presence in 50 countries.

Castañer offers handcrafted products carefully elaborated in each of its stages: skewing, braiding, warping, sole stitching, die-cutting, vulcanizing, heel pad production and, finally, stitching.

They wanted to replicate the same quality standard of its products in both physical and digital stores, where they receive a lot of customers. For this reason, Castañer decided to implement the only livechat system  on the market with visual support, Oct8ne, on their website to achieve their goals.  

According to Jessica Alonso, Castañer’s customer service manager: “The customer service has grown a lot. There was a time when it was to put out fires so we wanted to boost that commercial part that we can offer and we needed to open new channels, and one of those was the chat”. 

Nowadays, Castañer has three agents to give responses to the requests, which are generally focused on: doubts about the size guide, to know if there is enough stock, problems with the payment gateway and shipping costs. 

But beyond the number of human agents dedicated to providing service, Castañer saw that the number of customer requests was increasing and many of them could not be answered. 

For this reason, they decided to set up a chatbot that takes care of the queries in the first instance acting as a filter, and then pass on to a specialized team the users who need a person behind them to provide assistance.

“It has certainly taken a lot of work off our hands and allows us to be available 24 hours a day to respond,” adds Jessica, and she also clarifies that the response from customers when they are welcomed by a chatbot is very satisfactory and they have not received any complaints so far.  

Thanks to this implementation, Castañer was able to automate a large part of its customer service and allocate its human resources to boost sales through the online channel.

The main questions usually answered by the bot are related to order management, delivery times and shipping, exchanges and returns, size guide and help in locating stores. 

On the other hand, agents answer questions about shipping costs and incidents such as late delivery or returns.

In numbers, since the chatbot was implemented, an average of 3,092 help requests were received monthly, as opposed to the 135 received previously -a 2290.37 percent increase-, due to the fact that before the bot configuration agents were connected only during working hours and now there is 24/7 attention. 

All the information used to build the multiple question and answer tree in Oct8ne’s drag & drop system was taken from their CRM and from the queries previously answered by the customer service via email.  

Jessica explains that Castañer’s customers interact a lot with the coviewer, which helped them both to increase their sales and to maintain a much more fluid communication, thanks to the possibility of showing product details through images and videos or sharing screenshots, for example. 

In addition, he says that it “helps them see what products the customer is looking for,” which allows them to make recommendations according to what they were previously looking for. 

On the other hand, since the company implemented Oct8ne on its website, they opted to create a sales strategy based on triggers that communicate and inform the customer. For example: when the customer enters the collection, when they see many different models, if there are any promotions, if there is free shipping, among others. 

In this way, they induce the purchase in an intuitive way without bothering the customer, since only if they are interested they have to click on the pop-up and then ask for help.

Did you know that implementing a chat can increase the number of queries on your website?
Many times, users do not interact with the brand because they do not find the right channel -email is a medium that does not apply to all profiles and does not transmit immediacy-.
Request a demo to learn about the benefits of our LiveChat + chatbot and increase your goals.