Dr. Martens Rebuilt Customer Service From Scratch After Years of Decline

Dr. Martens Rebuilt Customer Service From Scratch After Years of Decline

Dr. Martens spent nearly a decade transforming into a direct-to-consumer business, growing that channel to roughly two-thirds of total revenue across more than 20 e-commerce markets and approximately 280 stores. But its customer service infrastructure never caught up, and by the time Graham Calder joined as Chief Technology and AI Officer, the cracks were showing publicly.

Speaking at a media roundtable during Dreamforce 2026, Calder described a three-year decline in Trustpilot scores that had dragged the brand into what he called "the red zone" — around 2 out of 5 stars. The problem wasn't subtle. Negative commentary about Dr. Martens increasingly centered on customer care failures, not product quality.

The root cause was fragmentation. Different regions ran different platforms — Zendesk in the US, Salesforce in the UK and Europe — and neither was being used effectively. Metrics weren't standardized. Policies varied by market. Systems didn't integrate, forcing agents into constant manual workarounds. Telephony platforms didn't connect to CRM. Order management systems didn't connect to CRM. Calder summarized the situation bluntly: "We were as fragmented as you could get."

Why it matters

Dr. Martens' experience illustrates a common trap for growing brands: operational infrastructure that can't keep pace with business model shifts. The company's decision to rebuild rather than patch demonstrates that sometimes the fastest path forward requires admitting legacy systems have reached their limit — and that technology alone won't fix what is fundamentally a skills and process problem.

Starting Over on a Unified Platform

Rather than attempt incremental fixes, Dr. Martens chose to rebuild entirely. The brand consolidated onto a single global Salesforce Service Cloud instance covering US, Canada, UK, and European operations, establishing one data model and one set of processes. For voice, it deployed two regional instances of Amazon Connect to manage latency, both integrated into the central Salesforce environment.

The team moved from design to launch in approximately seven months, starting in December and going live the following June. Calder's approach prioritized speed over custom development: "We didn't really want to spend any time on plumbing. What we wanted to do was get the platform in quickly, use someone else's integration and someone else's hard work."

The rebuild extended across the Salesforce stack, including Data 360 for centralized customer information and Marketing Cloud for post-purchase messaging, ensuring order updates and service changes were instantly visible across touchpoints.

Measurable Turnaround in Three Months

The results showed up quickly in the metric Dr. Martens couldn't control: public customer sentiment. Within roughly three months of going live, Trustpilot scores climbed from the "red zone" into what Calder termed the "amber zone," with a medium-term target of 4.5 out of 5.

Containment rates jumped from around 10% to approximately 50%, against an internal target of 75%. Real-time data revealed customer demand spread across roughly 17 hours daily, seven days a week — a pattern the brand's traditional nine-to-five operation couldn't serve. Automation now handles at least half of those contacts when human agents aren't available.

For agents, the change eliminated what Calder called "classic human swivel chair integration." Previously, if a customer placed an order and called two minutes later, agents couldn't see it. Now visibility is near-instantaneous. The learning curve was steep, but Calder noted that after about three months, agents reached a tipping point: "They go, oh my god, I wouldn't go back to doing it the way we used to do it."

Skills as Infrastructure

Calder emphasized that technology decisions represented only half the equation. When he first assessed Dr. Martens' Salesforce usage, he estimated the company was using roughly 2% of the platform's capacity due to a lack of internal expertise.

To close that gap, Dr. Martens brought in OSF Digital to accelerate the initial rollout while building an internal team in parallel. That handover is now underway, with full responsibility transitioning to the internal team over the following three months. Calder framed the investment as essential to avoiding another decline cycle: "If I don't have the talent around it to continue to evolve it and keep pace with the business needs and customer expectations, it will slowly decline again."

The brand chose to rebuild the system first and ask staff to adapt, rather than easing them into new tools gradually. As Calder put it: "There's two ways of doing this. You can bring the tech to the people, or you can bring the people to the tech. One is an upgrade, the other one is change. And we did the latter."

These details were first reported by CX Today in coverage of Dreamforce 2026.