From Transactional to Personalized Marketing: Everlane Transformed Their CX Strategy to Delight Shoppers

There are many ways to acquire and retain customers. Often, brands focus on acquiring customers at the lowest possible price. Our mission for Everlane was to craft a service experience that complemented the quality of our products. The first way is easy, but customers will go elsewhere when your competitors undercut you. The second is harder, but the long-term payoff is worth it.

One of the most effective ways to keep customers loyal is by empowering your CX team to represent your company’s values and mission at every touchpoint. Instead of limiting its role to serving as your help desk, try to envision CX as an extension of your brand and an arm of your marketing function. This approach also opens a channel for your customers to communicate with you, transforming your CX team into an asset that represents the voice of the customer within your organization.

We Wanted to Tap into Our Evangelist Community

Everlane makes ethically manufactured, eco-friendly apparel designed to last. We sell primarily online and at 11 retail stores in the continental United States. We don’t follow trends. Our focus is durable, comfortable, timeless clothing, footwear, and accessories made from the finest new and recycled material. We make products our customers can enjoy for decades.

I joined the company in 2022 and immediately saw an opportunity to tap into our brand enthusiasts. These are some of our key customers who understand the brand and can serve as advocates for our products.

The challenge was that we lacked a technology partner to help us fulfill that vision. Everlane had used Zendesk as our ticketing platform for nine years. It helped us answer customer emails about their orders but lacked a deeper view of customer behavior. We couldn’t gauge customer intent, sentiment, and interest or view purchase histories, so we only had a transactional view of the customer journey. It was also overly complex. If we wanted to use some of its touted omnichannel features, we needed a full-time engineer and implementation specialist to build an in-house solution, defeating the purpose of employing a SaaS CX solution.

Developing a Holistic Customer View

We needed a platform that offered a holistic view of the customer to help us push the creative boundaries of CX. We wanted to create personalized customer experiences and memorable connections at scale. To do this, we had to move away from the help desk-focused approach and adopt the customer journey. Instead of focusing on solving our customer’s problems, we wanted to engender their loyalty.

As an apparel and accessories brand, we recognize that selecting clothing is a highly personal experience. Our customers often share personal details about their body shape and fabric preferences. We can’t just give them a size chart and say, “Good luck.” Our CX team must lead with empathy, perhaps sharing that they know someone with a similar body type and tastes while explaining product features and benefits. Creating those types of moments of authentic connection weren’t possible on our previous platform.

A second catalyst was improving CX agent productivity. When I joined Everlane, I shadowed the team, and watching them move between systems was painful. We didn’t have a seamless integration with our order management system, and our people couldn’t confidently answer order status questions and other customer queries. Again, we needed a solution that would communicate with our other systems without bending over backwards to make it work.

We Hit the Ground Running with Out of the Box Features

Although I’d used Zendesk with multiple CX teams over the years, Kustomer had been on my radar since 2016, when I was working at MeUndies. My first impression was that it was extremely capable out of the box, and our evaluation confirmed my hunch. Part of the trial process was asking how Kustomer could help us achieve our dream state. How much effort would it require? Would we have to hire external consultants or use our in-house development team? CX teams are often underfunded and under-resourced, and we needed a partner who would get us to maturity and proficiency. Fortunately, Kustomer was aligned with our goals, and their solution required minimal engineering to connect the dots and ingest data from our various systems.

We quickly moved from evaluation to deployment. We met weekly with Alex, our implementation manager at Kustomer, throughout the rollout. He was incredibly methodical and helped us with project management. He was equally proficient with technology and well-versed in the Kustomer platform, and helped us with the integrations and milestones we needed for a successful deployment. Alex made our switch feel comfortable, which is remarkable given we were migrating from a CX platform we’d used for a decade.

Everlane had a lot of integrations to disentangle. Some, like the workforce management and survey tools, were available out of the box in the Kustomer marketplace. For example, we flowed our net promoter score surveys into the platform with a single click, but other integrations required the assistance of our engineering teams. Still, it was a rapid deployment. We started migrating our CX systems to Kustomer in early 2023 and completed the deployment in June. Out of the gate, we had already exceeded everything we could do with Zendesk. 

A Powerful New Tool to Enhance the Customer Experience

Kustomer has given our CX team powerful new tools to enhance the customer experience. These include  KIQ Customer Assist, the powerful bot which we affectionately named Everbot. Everbot analyzes customer intent inside our chat experience. It offers answers drawn from our help center knowledge base, which is written in our brand voice, so it becomes an extension and reflection of Everlane. If Everbot doesn’t deflect a query and the customer is routed to our contact center, the CX agent already has rich context to help guide their interaction, including a summary of the issue and the customer’s name, email, and order number. All that information helps us have meaningful conversations.

We also deployed the KIQ Agent Assist tool that summarizes conversations and transforms snippets of conversations into customer-friendly ideas. It significantly reduces average handle times and the ability to spell- and grammar-check conversations helps us build a consistent brand voice.

Kustomer also allows us to set up business rules that empower our CX team to flex their creative muscles instead of just following a script. We typically have a 30-day return window, but that doesn’t work for everybody. If somebody contacts us after that period, going through a typical IVR phone tree might lead to an automatic decline of the request. With Kustomer, we can bypass that rule if we’re dealing with a VIP who’s been ordering from us for many years. Our old system didn’t provide that level of personalization. All customers looked the same.

Adopting Kustomer has elevated our service levels and improved productivity because it is tightly integrated with our order system. We’ve seen a 13% reduction in average handle time and a 16% increase in agent productivity. Our team can better meet customer expectations by following up on orders and providing increasingly personalized service faster than we ever could before. No matter how they’re shopping, customers still want fast, friendly human responses, and our CX team has seen an 8% increase in our CSAT.

Our CX agents are incredibly pleased with Kustomer. We ran feedback surveys during the pilot before deploying the platform in June. We had them check out their new workflows by responding to a sample email. It was a truly profound moment when they realized they could see customer account and order details in a single view without having multiple tabs or windows open. Moving effortlessly across channels without missing a beat positively impacted their ability to serve customers.

We Are Using AI to Amplify Our Customer and Brand Voices

Migrating to Kustomer was a giant leap for us. Some leaders might be overwhelmed at the prospect of such a big shift. But the truth is, there is never a right time to make a change like this. Thankfully, Kustomer was an active and attentive partner who listened to our concerns and guided us through a potentially messy transition, transforming complexity into simplicity and making the implementation straightforward and organized.

Kustomer has brought AI to smaller operations like ours, allowing us to compete with bigger organizations on the CX front. Not too long ago, AI was seen as a luxury rather than an essential component of the CX stack. Companies like Kustomer have democratized the algorithms and models that were previously available to the few. Our CX team uses AI to better understand customers’ needs, wants, sentiments, and desires to influence their future behavior.

Everlane provides an alternative to fast fashion. We strive to lead as a provider of sustainable and ethical apparel. The quality of our products speaks for itself, and Kustomer is helping us provide meaningful and memorable shopping experiences that reflect the attention and care we put into our clothes. It has empowered our CX team to be more creative, engaged, and productive. The future is bright as we continue to delight shoppers, boost our bottom line, and amplify the voices of our customers and our brand.