Honeylove is not your typical garment brand. With a mission to “embolden women of all shapes and sizes through high-quality clothing and shapewear,” Honeylove aims to inspire customers to shape their destinies. Because Honeylove’s shapewear is often purchased for pivotal moments like weddings and performances, the stakes are high when something goes wrong.
The Honeylove Customer Experience Team is front and center at these pivotal moments resolving everything from sizing questions to shipping concerns with the highest level of finesse. The Customer Experience Team prides themselves on their warm, empathetic approach to support. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a response that doesn’t include Honeylove’s signature emoji, the purple heart 💜.
Escalations were the problem
In early 2023, Honeylove’s team was expanding and the company was committed to helping Customer Experience Specialists deliver top-notch support. Samara Bekkering, Honeylove’s Customer Experience Supervisor, noticed that questions that required escalations to a Team Lead resulted in increased handle times, agent frustration, and increased cost per case.
Agents on the team agreed. Favour Barde was just 6 months into her role and was worried about hitting her goals as she spun up. Unsure about how to answer some customer questions, she’d find herself waiting for help from her Team Lead.
Samara sprung into action. She saw an opportunity to tackle this support inefficiency using AI.
“With our growing business and the emergence of new AI technology, we saw a unique opportunity to increase agent autonomy and decrease escalations.”
Samara Bekkering, Customer Experience Supervisor
Enter Assembled Assist
As Samara started to look for product solutions, she was connected to Assembled’s New Products team. Samara knew that Assembled’s values aligned with Honeylove’s as both teams were focused on enabling agents to perform their best.
In April of 2023 Assembled started shadowing agents, learning which types of questions led to the most frustration and which drove escalations to Team Leads. John Wang, CTO at Assembled and leader of the New Products Team, became an expert in women’s shapewear.
“We knew we’d selected the best partner when the CTO at Assembled could answer questions about gaping cups, side overflow, and uniboob.”
Samara Bekkering, Customer Experience Supervisor
In a span of 2 months, the New Products Team successfully developed a tailored version of Assembled Assist to help Honeylove’s agents answer questions they otherwise would have escalated to Team Leads. The end result was a system fine-tuned to Honeylove that knew about garment sizing, upcoming sales, and the intricacies of Honeylove’s return policy.
When agents logged on to Zendesk, they’d have an Auto-drafted reply awaiting for them and could ask follow-up questions too. Agents were now getting highly accurate, instant replies instead of having to wait hours for busy Team Leads to come back with an answer. The result was that escalations to team leads went down by 20%.
What’s more, Assembled Assist had been fine-tuned to provide Honeylove’s signature empathetic brand voice, even down to including the signature 💜 emoji. The empathetic nature of Assist was borne out in the metrics. Responses that used Assist saw an 18% increase in the amount of good CSAT results from Honeylove’s customers.
“I like that Assist is really fast. It only takes a couple of seconds to come up with a response. And the tone is really nice and friendly and empathetic — they’re lovely responses.”
Favour Barde, Customer Experience Specialist
Honeylove and Assembled shape their own destinies
Assembled Assist’s intuitive reporting and accuracy tracking ensured Honeylove had access to all the information they needed to build a great AI foundation. Samara and team used Assembled’s Evaluations dashboard to quickly identify inaccuracies in Assist’s responses, monitoring any fluctuations in its performance. They continuously updated documentation in areas where Assist was not able to answer questions correctly, creating a positive flywheel effect as accuracy improved over 35% in the months after launch.
The hard work and focus paid off. After 5 months of usage, Assembled ran an analysis of agent productivity before and after the introduction of Assist to the team. Assist power users increased solves per hour by 54% compared to the average agent who improved solves per hour by 13%. Even those teammates who were using Assembled Assist on just a handful of questions saw a 32% increase in solves per hour.
Favour, though relatively new to Honeylove, became a high-performing agent and helped roll Assist out to other agents. Samara saw a reduction in escalations and was able to hit her OKRs. Before Assist, handling escalations required three team leads; with Assist, Samara needed just two.
I think we can all agree that a 💜 is in order for results like that.
