Executive summary

European Wax Center is a major personal care brand composed of a central headquarters and over 800 independently owned and operated franchises across the country. European Wax Center was managing their digital platforms manually and natively, without the help of a social media management platform, but found this style of working ran counter to European Wax Center’s customer-centric mission. Additionally, an outside agency European Wax Center hired to assist their social media team was responding to customers outside of customer service and often needed to forward information to that team for answers, causing inefficiencies and slower response time for guests, especially when it came to Instagram direct messages. To address their issues, European Wax Center brought in an experienced social media manager to consolidate European Wax Center’s social media communications and strategy. The first thing the new manager did was onboard the Khoros platform for social media management and customer service messaging.

The European Wax Center social media team handles both social media customer service and marketing activities. Their clear strategy and strong partner, Khoros, now enables them to manage digital customer engagement with great effectiveness. With Khoros, European Wax Center efficiently publishes content to their social channels, and consistently engages their guests in Khoros Engagement Manager. To manage their constant increases in customer message and inquiry volume, European Wax Center partnered with Khoros to integrate a chatbot onto Facebook and their web chat. The bot now handles simple FAQs, freeing up their marketing and service team to focus on more complex customer inquiries, and building more tools and automations to enhance the customer experience.

To keep up with the ever-changing landscape of customers’ preferred messaging channels, European Wax Center integrated Instagram DMs into the Khoros platform, making it easier to handle those messages with the same prioritization, filtering, and routing they leverage on other channels. This prevents them from missing important messages. Before integrating Instagram DMs, European Wax Center couldn’t tell if their social media manager had responded to a guest directly and they couldn’t see if the guest had reached out on other social channels as well; this sometimes delayed response times and confused guests with uncoordinated replies. Now European Wax Center can see all of their social media and chat conversations in one place, with holistic social media and chat conversation history, ensuring they deliver quick service. This also reduced repeat conversation volume, as guests receiving faster responses would no longer send the same question across multiple channels to get support. Before, the team was pulling analytics from social manually — a tedious task — but now they can easily pull accurate, up-to-date analytic reports from all social platforms and view the data in easy to share, easy to view dashboards.

European Wax Center faced several crises in the past year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a temporary closure of all of their centers. This caused their average incoming communications to increase by 300%, but by partnering with Khoros, they managed to respond to guests in under 24 hours, even on days when the incoming communications increased by as much as 700%. With Khoros, European Wax Center can meet their guests in their preferred channels and all of European Wax Center’s agents can work within the same platform, keeping communications organized and consistent. The social media team can now pull data from Khoros Intelligence to easily understand what’s happening with European Wax Center brand sentiment, and see the top social media conversations about European Wax Center for a full picture of the brand.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, European Wax Center launched an e-commerce platform, and now they can offer surprise and delight experiences to those guests. European Wax Center also has an extensive ambassador program, and data from the Khoros platform helps them identify and contact guests so they can invite them to join the program. In the future, their social media team plans to build out more community management guidelines and become involved with the paid media team. European Wax Center’s goal is to gain a 360-degree picture of their customer, and to that end, they plan to integrate all guest relations channels, including email, into their Khoros platform.

“We’ve been through the wringer, crisis-wise, this past year, and I don’t know if we would have gotten through it if we hadn’t onboarded Khoros a year ago. It’s been a hard year, but we’re coming out of it stronger, with excellent partners in Khoros.”

— Auburn Berry
Director of Social Media, PR, and Brand Activations