Birchbox is a retailer that delivers personalized monthly boxes of makeup, haircare, and skincare samples. As a subscription business, delivering best-in-class customer service is a top priority for Birchbox, which is why the company started using Agent Connect across its in-house service team.
Birchbox uses Agent Connect to drive agent motivation and rewards, as well as to empower team leaders to deliver more effective coaching. The company has integrated Agent Connect with Zendesk, which is the platform its agents use to manage all customer inquiries.
“Negative interactions happen in any contact center – it’s a fact of life. Our role as CX leaders is to ensure our agents learn from these negative interactions and then address the issue directly with customers. Agent Connect automates this coaching and service recovery workflow in a totally transformative way.”
– Deja Whitehead; Director of Customer Operations & Communications Manager, Birchbox
In addition to harnessing Agent Connect’s core people success features, Birchbox was among the first companies to start using the platform’s new service recovery functionality. While Birchbox delivers consistent high-quality service experiences, the company wanted to ensure that after negative interactions, the service team has the opportunity to make things right with customers.
How Agent Connect’s Service Recovery Works
1. When a customer leaves negative feedback through Agent Connect, it’s flagged within Agent Connect feedback streams and a new ticket is automatically
2. Birchbox CX leaders triage all negative feedback to decide whether it’s appropriate to follow up directly with the customer.
3. If a follow-up is warranted, the Zendesk ticket is assigned. For basic follow-ups, it’s the responsibility of the agent who managed the initial interaction to conduct the follow-up; for more complex cases, the responsibility typically falls on team leaders.
4. Before the follow-up, team leaders use the negative feedback to coach the individual agent. This improves the effectiveness of the follow-up and helps ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again.
5. After the customer has been re-contacted and the new ticket is closed in Zendesk, a follow-up Agent Connect request is automatically triggered. This helps Birchbox measure changes in customer sentiment.
Results Birchbox Achieves with Agent Connect
Uplift in overall CSAT
By coaching agents ahead of service recovery interactions, Birchbox has been able to drive positive changes in agent behavior. This has resulted in an overall improvement in customer satisfaction since the program was launched.
Changing customer sentiment
Follow-up feedback requests have proven that the team has made things right with customers who have had subpar experiences. For a subscription business, delighting customers is a key driver in reducing customer churn.
“Launching our service recovery program with Agent Connect and Zendesk has driven measurable change across our contact center. Agents are more aware of the impact of delivering poor service experiences and this has resulted in proactive improvements in service delivery, which means higher quality experiences for customers.”
– Deja Whitehead; Director of Customer Operations & Communications Manager, Birchbox
Product and policy innovation
By analyzing trends around negative interactions, the Birchbox team has been able to spot trends in customer feedback. These trends have helped drive product and policy changes, which improve customer experience and raise the profile of the service team across the organization.
