Optimizing social messaging for a frictionless customer experience

Everyone loves getting packages in the mail. And for BoxyCharm subscribers, good mail days are guaranteed. Each month, members receive a gorgeous beauty box of goodies, including makeup, skincare products, beauty tools, and color cosmetics. Customers are encouraged to get creative with new beauty products, delivered straight to their doorstep. With a comprehensive series of health and beauty tutorials and a supportive online community that celebrates self-expression, BoxyCharm empowers members to define beauty for themselves. Their mantra? Community-first.

It’s no surprise that BoxyCharm (part of Beauty For All Industries) prioritizes delivering world-class customer service—seamless, accessible, and focused on the lifestyle of today’s customers, who value speedy, real-time responses.

Building success together

In response to a period of rapid growth in 2020, BoxyCharm was looking to scale their customer support system to keep pace with demand while continuing to provide the highest-quality service for its subscribers. An essential requirement for any new partner was a demonstrable commitment to the company’s future growth and long-term success. During the research and evaluation process, the BoxyCharm team felt that Zendesk was a natural fit right from the start.

Smooth transition. Untapped potential.

The transition to Zendesk gave Anna Skidmore, vice president of BFA care, and her team an opportunity to re-think their operations strategy. “Because of Zendesk’s professional services team, the transition was so much easier than I anticipated,” Anna explained. “They answered all of our questions and were clearly knowledgeable about the platform in every way, so they really put us at ease.”

Because of how easy the move to Zendesk was, BoxyCharm reconsidered the reach of their entire operations strategy to make the best use of their new options. “The sky was clearly the limit with Zendesk,” Skidmore commented.

Even with this pivot to a more ambitious strategy, it took just three months to complete the transition.

Simple, effortless. It was the perfect match

The simplicity of Zendesk’s platform was a huge relief for the team. “Things that are extremely straightforward—like setting up triggers and automatic responses—had previously been very difficult for us,” Anna elaborated.

Before switching to Zendesk, adapting the customer support system to meet new business needs had been a cumbersome task. But now, it was effortless. “That kind of ease of capability to make changes as needed based on the business—whether it be a new event, a new brand, or a new way for people to shop—would not have been the case with our former platform.”

Integrations: Facilitating a frictionless customer service journey

With 70% of customer inquiries concerned with order status, the team at BoxyCharm had already begun using Ada, an automated AI agent to respond to these more straightforward requests, allowing customers to self-serve on the most common inquiries. “We see automation as a long-term part of our service story,” Anna Skidmore explained. “We now have order-tracking API capability inside of Ada.” Successful automation is empowering customers to self-serve, freeing up customer support agents to focus on more complex requests.

With Zendesk, BoxyCharm can explore even more ways to use Ada, freeing up even more agent time. “We joined Sunshine Conversations so we could support Instagram direct messages. Now we’re exploring putting Ada inside that direct messaging area so it can also deflect those conversations. None of that would be possible if Ada weren’t such close partners with Zendesk.”

It’s not just the customer support team who have benefited from Zendesk’s extensibility. A seamless integration with Jira enables the development team to link and track technical support tickets. Then there’s the integration with Fivetran, which enables BoxyCharm to maintain their in-house data warehouse, keeping their archives updated with information from Zendesk.

The integration with TrustPilot even offers opportunities for proactive brand management. “Now all of the feedback and comments that we receive from reviews in Trustpilot come into Zendesk as tickets. We have a dedicated reputation management team that responds to them and addresses any issues that are being raised there.” This connection to TrustPilot empowers BoxyCharm to stay close to their mission of putting community and customers first.

Meeting the customer where they are with integrated social messaging

Before partnering with Zendesk, BoxyCharm’s customer service had been primarily email. A move to Zendesk meant that customers could reach out in more ways that were convenient to them including via social media direct messaging. “Over the past few months, we’ve successfully migrated our private social media channels into Zendesk to create an omnichannel view of our customers. By doing so, we improved our Time to First Response and ensured that we resolved 100% of our private social media tickets,” Anna reported.

Turning up the volume on the voice of the customer

The team were also keen to make the most of Zendesk’s powerful reporting capabilities. Anna knew that digging into the data would reveal key insights that could benefit the wider business. “The biggest challenge that we had was we were never really able to quantify any type of issue without manual tagging or keyword searches,” she explained. Now, with that infrastructure set up in Zendesk “it speaks volumes when we bring issues back to our operations team and can tell them, ‘Hey, we have an issue in X, Y, Z area that we need to fix’,” she added.

By giving other teams including product, fulfillment, and manufacturing insight into those trends, BoxyCharm gives their customers a potent role as advocates for change and improvements. And in that situation, everyone wins. “It’s not just about servicing your members, it’s about also servicing your internal stakeholders. And the way we do that is being able to have this rich reporting around what our members are saying,” Anna explained.

Relationship-building is at the heart of BoxyCharm’s success as a business. So how do they view their relationship with Zendesk?

“It’s been outstanding,” said Anna. “It was clear that the Zendesk team was heavily invested in making this partnership work and seeing our success to fruition. So from a partnership experience, it couldn’t have gone better. I definitely felt, and continue to feel, that everyone is invested in our success.”

A 10-point CSAT increase demonstrates the impact of such a successful partnership. And this is just the beginning. Next on the agenda? Enriching customer profiles with Sunshine, empowering support agents to truly personalize every customer interaction.

With Zendesk on their side, BoxyCharm is paying close attention to the needs and behaviors of its members in a post-pandemic world, ensuring that they continue to meet customers where they are and with exactly what they need.