ThirdLove

The Challenge

Direct-to-consumer bra and underwear brand ThirdLove disrupted incumbent retailers with a new way to shop for bras with half cup sizing, data driven recommendations and a consultative approach to customer service. As the brand continued its rapid growth, ThirdLove needed a CX solution designed to track the entire customer journey and optimize Fit Stylist (agents) and customer experiences.

The Results

• Integrated with Shopify to create an all-in-one customer service solution that manages customer interactions and purchases, helping Fit Stylists deliver consultative support at scale, resulting in a consistent CSAT of 96%.
• Saved thousands of dollars in lost inventory and revenue per month by preventing fraudulent charges from processing and shipping. With powerful segmentation capabilities, ThirdLove identifies and cancels fraudulent Shopify orders directly in Kustomer.
• Analyzed real-time team and individual Fit Stylist performance, helping identify peak hours of productivity to optimize scheduling and staffing.

 

“For direct-to-consumer brands like ThirdLove, customers expect you to know them by the sum of their experiences, not as a single, isolated event. With Kustomer’s open API, ThirdLove integrated our customer service solution with Shopify and Stella Connect to create a single platform for support interactions and brand touchpoints. Now, our Fit Stylists have the holistic view they need to see each customer as a true individual.”

Gio Brown, CX Systems Admin Manager, ThirdLove

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ThirdLove, the direct-to-consumer retailer that launched in 2013 by husband and wife Heidi Zek and David Spector, has become a major disruptor in the bra and underwear space. Their success stems from a modern business model that’s all about the fit. Laura West, Customer Experience and Operations Manager at ThirdLove, explains, “ThirdLove uses Fit Finder, which is a 60-second quiz that asks women about their current bra and uses millions of data points on breast shape, cup fit and band tightness to provide a size recommendation and create better-fitting bras.”

This new bra shopping model, built upon consultative customer service, has catapulted ThirdLove toward unicorn status, and put it in direct competition with industry heavyweight Victoria’s Secret. ThirdLove strove to create nurturing and authentic relationships with their customers, and as the Customer Experience team grew, they sought a customer-first solution.

To continue providing the customer service that helped build their rapidly scaling business, especially as their e-commerce model was about to include in-store experiences, ThirdLove identified Kustomer as the right technology fit for their business.

A Holistic View of Customers Drives Consultative Support at Scale

Before Kustomer, ThirdLove’s CX team was experiencing a common customer service headache—managing multiple applications to find the customer information they needed. Laura shares, “We wanted to alleviate our Fit Stylists from having to exit the system to retrieve order information, such as the customer’s address, or navigating to a new window to view prior ticket information.”

With Kustomer’s open API, ThirdLove designed a customized, all-in-one solution by integrating the platform with systems their customer service team uses everyday, including Shopify, Amazon Connect, Stella Connect, Google, Accuity, and their return and exchange platform.

 

“Once a Fit Stylist begins a conversation, they have a wealth of information in Kustomer about the customer’s journey right at their fingertips.”

Laura West, Customer Experience & Operations Manager, ThirdLove

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Fit Stylists now have access to a customer’s entire history— directly in Kustomer’s Timeline view—including all previous interactions, orders, and survey ratings. “Once a Fit Stylist begins a conversation, they have a wealth of information in Kustomer about her journey right at their fingertips,” says Laura.

And Kustomer doesn’t just track and manage digital experiences. The brand has recently opened a Concept Store with Fit Stylists on premise to provide consultative customer service. Laura explains, “A challenge for customers at traditional brick-and-mortar stores is their in-store and online purchases are not related. Kustomer enables our Fit Stylists to see in-store historical buying data, and they can use that information to help the customer accordingly.”

The switch to Kustomer has helped the team maintain the approach their customers expect as well as an exceptional satisfaction rating, averaging at 96% consistently.

Freedom to Communicate Anywhere

While consultative customer service depends on attention to detail, it also requires a certain level of convenience. That’s why ThirdLove’s CX team is available across Chat, Email, and Social Media. The team can meet customers anywhere, and Fit Stylists manage every conversation directly in the Kustomer platform.

Not only can customers contact ThirdLove across a variety of channels, they can also freely switch between those channels throughout the course of a single conversation. It’s the true omnichannel support ThirdLove sought in a new solution, and now the company comfortably facilitates seamless and frictionless customer and Fit Stylist experiences.

A Deeper Understanding of Productivity and Performance

To deliver efficient customer service at scale, ThirdLove needed more than just customer data. They needed an intelligent solution that automates time-consuming processes as well as provides team performance insights to drive continuous improvement.

With Kustomer’s powerful workflow engine, ThirdLove has built a two-tier intelligent routing system for conversations, which eliminates manual sorting and assigning while helping the CX team better understand customer needs, escalate high priority issues quickly, and identify any knowledge gaps.

The Tier 1 team handles new inbound conversations— automatically routed based on channel. Then, the Tier 2 team is tapped if a Tier 1 Fit Stylist cannot reach a resolution. A Fit Stylist simply creates a note in the conversation to explain the challenge, and the workflow engine automatically routes the customer to the Tier 2 team to provide assistance. “This feature is super cool because when our Fit Stylist is redirecting a customer to our Tier 2 team, he or she is documenting the issue simultaneously, which gives the next team a head start once the issue escalates. We can also assess our team more closely to see who’s asking more questions, and understand where there might be gaps in knowledge so we can address them,” says Laura.

The ability to set statuses in Kustomer was key to identifying peak conversation times and guiding the team on scheduling events without disrupting customer service. Laura explains, “These insights helped us to better understand our production time with a multitude of statuses. We’re using these insights to help optimize our scheduling, as well as plan additional training sessions for Fit Stylists during lighter hours.”

Proactively Engaging the ThirdLove Community

ThirdLove’s CX team isn’t just conducting reactive support, but engaging customers proactively to mitigate potential issues and obtain product feedback. With the platform’s segmentation and bulk communication capabilities, the team can pinpoint customers based on any data available in Kustomer, including interaction history, spend, order information and satisfaction rating.

“It’s an awesome way for our CX team to perform recovery efforts, or even request feedback from customers who purchased a new product. It’s an easy way to segment that population and quickly reach out to them.”

What’s Next

With plans to continue its growth trajectory, ThirdLove will begin exploring ways to further enhance efficiencies in Kustomer.

“There’s so much opportunity to leverage Kustomer’s API and help create a more seamless customer and Fit Stylist experience. We want to improve our customers’ ability to self-service, and provide our Fit Stylists with additional tools to improve their knowledge so they can effectively resolve issues. We’re excited to continue to grow the relationship between ThirdLove and Kustomer.”