How Merki Market cut response times by 87% while expanding across Europe

Merki Market sells bathroom and kitchen products to customers across Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Today, the ecommerce company manages hundreds of orders each month, and as the business has grown, so has the volume and complexity of customer support.

Customers come to Merki Market with the questions you'd expect from an ecommerce business: Where is my order? When will it arrive? How do I make a return? But they also turn to the team before making a purchase to help understand dimensions, finishes, technical specifications, and whether different products are compatible.

That means customer support isn't just there to solve problems after a purchase. It's part of helping customers feel confident enough to make one.

As Merki Market expanded, the team needed a way to handle more of those conversations without adding the same amount of support headcount, operating costs, or complexity.

By introducing Help Scout's Inbox features into their workflow, they've been able to do exactly that.

Bringing order to a growing support queue

Before Help Scout, Merki Market managed customer support through traditional email. That made it easy for messages to fall through the cracks. Once someone opened an email, it no longer stood out as needing attention, even if the customer was still waiting for a response.

Help Scout gave the team a much clearer view of the work that still needed to be done. Conversations remain pending until someone responds, while collision detection shows when another teammate is already viewing or replying to a conversation. With clear ownership and visibility across the inbox, the team can work through a growing volume of customer questions without overlooking requests or duplicating work.

“With Help Scout, we can clearly see which customers are still waiting for a reply,” says Gabriel Silva, customer service manager at Merki Market. “This reduces the risk of conversations being overlooked and allows us to prioritize our daily workload much more effectively.”

Removing the friction behind every response

Once the team could clearly see what needed attention, Help Scout also made it easier to move those conversations forward.

Saved Replies help Merki Market quickly handle recurring questions about deliveries, tracking, and returns, while Notes give support and logistics a place to coordinate behind the scenes. And because the full conversation history stays with the customer, another teammate can step in without having to track down a colleague or piece together context across email threads.

That's especially useful for Merki Market's hybrid team. Whether someone is in the office or working remotely, everyone is working from the same customer history and the same queue.

Together with other organizational improvements, that new way of working has helped Merki Market cut its average email response time by 87%, from around 24 hours to less than three business hours.

Making room for the next stage of growth

Faster responses matter to customers, but for Merki Market, the bigger impact is what that efficiency makes possible as the business grows.

The company now processes more than 350 orders every month across five European markets, and customer inquiries have increased considerably alongside them. Its support team, however, hasn't needed to grow at the same rate.

That gives Merki Market room to keep growing without making customer support increasingly expensive or complex. And the company already has its sights set on its next phase of expansion, with plans to enter Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland.

Each new market will bring more customers, orders, and conversations. But Merki Market now has a support operation that can absorb more of that growth without requiring a larger team behind it to grow at the same pace.