Case Study

How UST automated 98% of customer service requests and cut franchise onboarding time by 60% for a global apparel retailer

UST unified fragmented customer service and franchise operations on a single Pega-powered platform, automating request handling, improving visibility, and creating a scalable foundation for operational growth.

OUR CLIENT

Our client is a leading global apparel and lifestyle retailer with approximately 19,000 employees and more than 3,400 stores and shop-in-shops worldwide. Operating across retail, e-commerce, and wholesale channels, the company manages large volumes of customer service and franchise-related requests that directly affect operational efficiency, partner experience, and brand performance.

THE CHALLENGE

Managing customer service operations across disconnected systems

Growth was outpacing the systems built to support it. As customer service volumes climbed, the retailer found itself running two of its most operationally critical functions, customer service and franchise management, on separate platforms that were never designed to talk to each other. Requests arrived by email, and customer service reps had to manually create and track each one in legacy applications, with no automated way to confirm status or catch delays before they became a problem.

That manual foundation showed its limits fastest in the areas with the least room for error:

• Manual request creation slowed response times and added effort to every single case.
• Damaged goods claims and unpaid invoice management lacked consistent tracking, leaving accountability to depend on memory rather than process.
• Separate customer service and franchise systems created operational silos, with no unified view of how a request moved from intake to resolution.
• Limited workflow capabilities made it difficult to enforce compliance and process consistency across regions.
• Franchise onboarding required heavy manual coordination across teams, with no shared workflow to keep it moving on its own.

None of these were isolated issues. They were symptoms of the same root cause: two critical functions, disconnected systems, and a manual process trying to hold both together. Each new region, partner, or request added complexity without adding capacity, and the retailer's workflow capabilities weren't built to absorb that growth. Without a more scalable approach, operational complexity was on track to outpace the business's ability to manage it.

THE TRANSFORMATION

Unifying customer service and franchise operations through workflow automation

UST didn't start with a platform. It started by sitting inside the customer service and franchise teams' actual workflows, tracing where handoffs broke down, where visibility disappeared, and where manual effort multiplied fastest. That diagnosis shaped a single, deliberate goal: replace fragmented processes with one unified, scalable operating model, built on Pega customer service, that brought both functions into a shared environment.

From there, the build focused on the points of friction identified during discovery:

• Automated request creation using email listener technology, removing manual intake as the first bottleneck in every case.
• Standardized workflows for damaged goods claims, unpaid invoice management, credit approvals, sales approvals, and franchise onboarding while replacing memory-dependent processes with governed, repeatable ones.
• Real-time SAP integration, giving customer service reps direct access to customer and transaction data without switching systems mid-case.
• Centralized dashboards and reporting, turning what used to be invisible — request status, compliance risk, process bottlenecks — into something leadership could see and act on.
• A scalable technical foundation, built to support future customer service modernization rather than solve only today's problem.

Individually, each piece solved a specific breakdown. Together, they did something bigger: they gave the retailer one operating environment where customer service and franchise activity moved through the same governed process, with the same visibility, for the first time. What had been two disconnected functions became a single, coordinated system built to scale with the business rather than strain against its growth.

THE IMPACT

Faster service delivery, lower manual effort, and stronger operational control

The clearest sign the platform worked wasn't a dashboard metric. It was what stopped happening. Reps stopped manually re-entering requests. Franchise teams stopped coordinating onboarding steps by hand. Compliance-critical cases stopped relying on someone to remember to follow up. What once required constant manual intervention started running on its own.

The numbers make that shift concrete:



What started as a customer service automation initiative became something more durable: a scalable operating foundation the retailer can build on as volume grows, regions expand, and new processes need the same discipline this platform already proved it can deliver.

CTA

Customer service processes should not depend on disconnected systems and manual work. Discover how UST helps retailers modernize operations through customer service automation for retail, workflow optimization, and scalable digital platforms.