Love, Bonito delivers exceptional service with strong understanding of Asian women

Co-founder Rachel Lim started a fashion blog shop that sold preloved clothes, which officially became Love, Bonito in 2010. Its core mission is to celebrate and uplift Asian women with thoughtfully designed apparel for everyday wear. Today, Love, Bonito is Southeast Asia’s leading direct-to-consumer, omnichannel womenswear brand, with more than 20 physical stores in key markets such as Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. The brand is rapidly expanding into the Philippines and the United States, and currently ships to over 20 countries.

As one of the fastest growing womenswear brands in the region, it needed a more comprehensive solution that could easily scale up alongside its international expansion. “We needed a solution that could keep up with evolving customer needs and our ever-growing support team,” explains Dione Song,CEO of Love, Bonito. “This meant finding a solution that empowered our agents to resolve customer queries fast and deliver exceptional customer service.” Since the upgrade, Love, Bonito has maintained a 94 percent CSAT score, 14 percent higher than the retail industry benchmark and 10 percent greater than the brand’s previous score.

Finding the perfect fit

After considering multiple solutions, Love, Bonito opted to work with Zendesk. “Zendesk offered features and customisation that were suitable for the business. Moreover, the solutions were easy to integrate with our existing set-up. With the software, we could identify customer pain points and resolve them swiftly” says Sophie Lin, Senior Manager (Customer Experience). “Plus, it was user-friendly and enabled us to onboard agents easily.”

In 2017, Love, Bonito deployed Zendesk in just under a month with several plug-ins from the app marketplace to further integrate with the brand’s existing infrastructure. Zendesk’s easy onboarding and knowledge base of step-by-step guidance tutorials also allowed customer service agents to start addressing customer queries quickly.

Six years later, 25 customer service agents rely on the tool daily to communicate with customers.
Currently, Love, Bonito uses Zendesk for email tickets, knowledge base, analytics, and answer bot, and has approximately 100 automations, triggers and macros set up. These help identify urgent inquiries or those with negative sentiment based on customer keywords, which are then routed to specialized agents for prompt attention.

Tailoring customer service experience

The biggest impact seen upon adopting the ticketing solution has been the satisfaction of Love Bonito’s customers. Customer enquiries from multiple channels are now all collected in one location. “We offer customers a variety of ways to reach us, whether it’s sending an email, using a social media platform, or chatting with an answer bot. And since everything is streamlined, nothing falls through the cracks.” says Lin.

We offer customers a variety of ways to reach us, whether it’s sending an email, using a social media platform, or chatting with an answer bot. And since everything is streamlined, nothing falls through the cracks.Sophie Lin, Senior Manager (Customer Experience) at Love, Bonito Love, Bonito is also able to identify and categorise inquiries, especially those that require more time to resolve and prioritise those to ensure swift resolution. Ultimately, this enhances customer interactions and minimises any friction they might encounter. The company’s loyal community has noticed the difference. “One of the unexpected features that we’ve come to rely on is the automation for CSAT surveys. It’s an important measure that helps us know how we’ve been doing and how we can do better for our community,” explains Lin.

Zendesk Answer Bot has transformed customer interactions on social media and encouraged self-service with 35 percent of users opting for this option. As a bonus, the bot’s knowledge base is continuously updated based on customer questions. “Offering self-service options not only empowers our customers to find answers to their questions independently,” says Lin. “It frees up valuable time for our agents who can focus on customer requests that require more attention beyond standard procedures, such as styling suggestions.”

Empowering employees to do better

Queries also get resolved much faster now since everything functions on one integrated platform. Previously, queries were collated in spreadsheets and agents would waste time updating these sheets daily. Agents also had to multitask across several platforms since customer queries often required additional information from one of the internal teams.

To optimize the whole process, Love, Bonito streamlined its escalation process and integrated the Zendesk workspace with Slack. When a query comes in, the relevant person within an internal department is automatically alerted and responds without need for an agent to intercede. “It’s simplified the query escalation process and agents can prioritise the important issues that need quick resolution. This has helped boost agent productivity by 20 to 30 percent,” says Lin.

Having Zendesk in place also offers more transparency to agents and helps supervisors forecast resourcing needs. “With individual views of their KPIs and productivity, agents have autonomy over their workload,” explains Lin. “It also makes it much easier for supervisors to manage agent resourcing and provide support as and when required.”

Leveraging data to design its future

A keen understanding of customer needs has been the foundation for Love, Bonito’s rapid rise since day one. As such, one of the biggest benefits has been the valuable insights from customer interactions available via Zendesk’s custom-built reporting. “With Zendesk’s analytics, we can assess the impact of customer frustrations during their purchase journey, allowing us to prioritize fixes and enhancements. It also enables us to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience, such as the need for a size recommender feature,” explains Lin. “This data-driven approach helps us refine our customer journey from start-to-end across various touchpoints.” Love, Bonito can now prioritize consumer trends to guide its decision-making across all aspects of the business.

This is just the start of Love, Bonito’s revolutionary fashion retail journey. “AI is transforming industries globally and we want to find new ways to empower our employees to enhance customer experience,” says Song. “Apart from continuing to adapt to changing customer preferences and expectations, our ultimate goal is to anticipate and address their unspoken needs proactively.”