The challenge: Scheduling with efficiency and empowerment in mind
Meet Lulus: the stylish, affordable, and iconic fashion brand known for its customer experience just as much as its beloved women’s wear. Born out of Northern California in 1996, Lulus designs, buys, and sells everything from formal wear to all-occasion clothing like denim, shoes, and swimwear. And as Director of Customer Experience Amy Coleman says, “Everything comes back to creating an unparalleled customer experience, which for us means thinking about our customers as human beings.”
At Lulus, we are people who care about people. CX is one of our pillars, and it’s what we’re known for.
Amy Coleman, Director of Customer Experience
From the beginning, the team at Lulus did what few eCommerce companies were willing to do: invest in CX. They saw how critical CX was to standing out and resonating in this digital world. To them, it was all about letting go of the norms from the brick and mortar retail world, and adapting to what people needed now. This was more difficult when it came to making staffing decisions. Says Amy: “We just didn’t have the data to guide decisions as to who to schedule when and where. Names were put on a sheet and shifts were given based on how many seats were in the office. There was no insight into being overstaffed; only the obvious downstream effects that would happen when they were understaffed.”
In late 2019, the team adopted a new CRM platform for customer contact, which at last gave them the data they longed for. But, since they were still limited to scheduling on spreadsheets, Amy and her team weren’t able to forecast staffing demand with any certainty, nor could they reliably track adherence or plan for accurate headcount needs. The result? Any support manager’s worst nightmare: low team morale as a result of agents contending with scheduling mishaps. Amy knew this needed to be addressed quickly, especially when it came to retention.
This is crucial for retention. You need to think beyond hard metrics alone. There are people’s lives at stake here, our employees. Everything you schedule is a critical piece to what they are able to count on in their life, inside and outside of work.
Amy Coleman, Director of Customer Experience
Assembled helps Lulus put its team first
Together with Elizabeth , Lulus’ customer service operations manager, Amy went in search of a solution that gave them visibility and the ability to meet tight SLAs while empowering agents. When Assembled came their way, the Lulus team was immediately struck by how easy and intuitive everything was, starting with an onboarding process that had them up and running in just days. Says Amy, “if things are complicated or hard to use, you will not taste success. You will not get a return on investment if it’s too hard. Assembled is a platform that is not hard to use, easy to follow and easy to teach. It has simple language that isn’t technical. The simplicity factor was #1.”
Once the Lulus team was up and running in Assembled, they were able to tackle staffing requirements for all support channels. Historically, looking at concurrent chats and SMS had been next to impossible, but with Assembled, they were finally able to see forecasted contacts and required headcount volume all in one view.
We say this a lot as a team: “let Assembled do its thing.” Assembled is like seeing in 4-D - you see things that you weren’t able to see before. It is like the Claritin commercial where the fogginess is lifted.
Amy Coleman, Director of Customer Experience
For their part, Elizabeth and Amy also saw time savings, especially when it came to scheduling.
We used to assign all breaks manually and it was such a burden to figure out when the best times would be. When we use Assembled, we can have everything baked into the shifts - this was life-changing!
Elizabeth Farrell, Customer Service Operations Manager
When it came to addressing the most important and challenging problem of agent morale, Assembled helped the Lulus team take a huge step forward. First, they used the Staffing Timeline to create optimized shifts to help keep agents in the groove instead of constant context-switching between productive and non-productive events. Then, using the Agent Performance and Agent Activity Reports, they were able identify a critical issue of overextended agents, which helped make the case for growing out the team. And on a daily basis, the entire Lulus team was able to see both schedules and forecasted demand, SLA%, and more in one place. At last, it was the data they needed put in the context that made the most sense to them. This included meeting the agents exactly where they worked.
We really loved the Slack and Google Calendar integration - they have really eliminated the need for the leadership team to communicate all these things. Prior, we had to do research to send them a Slack message, etc - now Assembled pre-plans it and communicates to the agent for you! It’s so much more predictable and safe - two things the world isn’t right now.
Elizabeth Farrell, Customer Service Operations Manager
Empowered agents, ecstatic managers, and happy customers - this outcome looks really good on Lulus.
