BSN Sports Scores Big with AI-Driven Customer Service

The Challenge

Since 1972, BSN Sports has elevated student athletics with extensive sports expertise, uniforms, apparel, and equipment. Today, this leading sports goods brand offers over 32,000 premium products across five ecommerce outlets to ensure customers get the gear they need and can spend more time focusing on the game.

While BSN Sports serves both institutional customers, their customer service team primarily focuses on parents and student-athletes, who make up 90% of their contact volume. Serving individual and organizational buyers requires a more nuanced approach to customer care processes and technology.

The brand’s core principles of teamwork, efficiency, and hard work resonate throughout the customer service team as they run to meet these challenges. However, there was a clear disconnect between mission and capability. Operating with a fragmented system of legacy platforms, the team struggled to handle customer contacts efficiently.

The challenges peaked during fall sports season — August through November. Without proper forecasting tools or consolidated customer data, the team relied on educated guesses about staffing needs. This often led to over-hiring temporary help just to maintain basic service levels. Customer wait times were wildly inconsistent, ranging from two-hour holds to instant answers, creating unpredictable service experiences.

The fragmentation ran deep.

“If one agent handled a customer’s email and another took their phone call, we had no way to connect those interactions,” Mandi explains. “We were essentially working in silos, with no visibility into the customer’s full story. We couldn’t even see if someone else was actively helping that same customer.”

For a brand built on teamwork and putting players first, this disconnected approach to customer service wasn’t just inefficient — it fundamentally misaligned with BSN Sports’ core values. They needed a solution to bring the same level of coordination and excellence to their customer service that they helped bring to athletic programs nationwide.

The Solution

After thoroughly evaluating customer service platforms, BSN Sports found their answer in Gladly’s unified approach.

“We started with three basic requirements: getting email, chat, and phone calls filtering into the same place,” says Mandi. “But what really set Gladly apart was their native voice, email, and chat integration — it eliminated the need for multiple systems and hours of manual work.”

The transformation was comprehensive. Instead of scattered customer information across various platforms, Gladly created a single, unified customer view. Each interaction, regardless of channel, became part of a continuous timeline that gave agents complete context for every conversation. This shift was particularly crucial for BSN Sports’ complex operation, where agents handle inquiries across five different commerce platforms and thousands of products.

Building on this foundation, BSN Sports embraced Gladly’s generative AI capabilities to enhance their service further. Their AI, affectionately named Stanley by the team, accurately responds to customer questions by leveraging BSN Sports’ knowledge base. This enables Stanley to deliver precise, effective responses directly to customers, freeing BSN’s agents to focus on tasks and issues requiring their unique human expertise. Agents can also leverage auto-replies, placeholders for specific customer data, localized answers, and specific answer suggestions, allowing agents to provide accurate, consistent responses across all channels.

“Our agents love having the ability to adjust message tone between friendly and professional, depending on the customer’s needs,” says Mandi. “As a leader, I feel confident knowing our customer communications are consistently on-brand and appropriate.”

With their new unified platform in place, BSN Sports was ready to transform their service metrics and empower their team with data-driven insights.

Outcome

The new approach to BSN Sports’ customer service operations delivered immediate, measurable results. The team achieved and maintained above 90% service levels across all channels — answering calls within 30 seconds, emails within 24 hours, and chats within 1-2 minutes. These improvements were just the beginning.

The efficiency gains have been dramatic. Average handle time dropped from 6 minutes and 12 seconds to 4 minutes and 39 seconds, saving over a minute and a half on each customer interaction. Overall contact volume decreased by 10%, largely due to eliminating duplicate customer efforts.

“Before, if a customer emailed and didn’t get a quick response, they might email again or call,” Mandi explains. “Those would go to different places with no understanding of both efforts. Now, having that singular view, we’ve seen a significant reduction.”

Perhaps most striking has been the impact on peak season operations. Armed with accurate data, BSN Sports revolutionized their staffing approach. Rather than hiring too few or too many agents for peak seasons, the team has insight into accurate contact forecasts. This enables leadership to optimize costs and efficiencies in peak staffing according to real requirements rather than rough estimates. Despite reducing peak staffing from 70 to 30 temporary workers, agents had more time and resources to handle customers successfully while allowing the company to redirect those funds for growth.

“Having the data makes the difference,” remarks Mandi. “We prioritize changes based on whether they make things better for the customers, the agents, or the business. Those are the improvements we tackle first.”

The unified platform’s data insights have transformed how BSN Sports identifies and addresses systemic issues. During peak season, the team identified a website error affecting 10% of customers every 20-30 minutes, enabling immediate action from their commerce team. The same data-driven approach applies to product feedback.

“We can tell you that today alone we had 20 calls on this one particular sweatshirt,” explains Mandi. “And now we can pull that customer contact through our AI summaries and say, ‘Here’s a summarization of those 20 contacts.'”

This ability to quickly quantify and share customer feedback has given the customer service team a stronger voice in driving business improvements. The data-driven approach has enabled BSN Sports to better fulfill its core mission of enhancing student athletics. With agents now equipped to provide consistent, efficient service, parents and student-athletes spend less time dealing with service issues and focusing more on what matters — the game itself.