Truly Beauty’s Robbie Loewenbein knows where you might not be looking
No time for a great story? No problem. Here’s the high level:
- Customer service data is one of the most untapped resources for driving operational improvement. The Voice of the Customer exercise is key to unlocking it.
- Ops pros that learn how to speak CX and ops become indispensable.
- A crucial trait for ops success? Empathy.
“She told us that she had to call the police!” says Robbie Loewenbein, recalling a specific customer he had encountered while on the customer experience (CX) team at online pet supply retailer, Chewy.
Turns out, the customer (who we’ll call Jen) did, in fact, call the police. Right in Chewy’s core demo of middle-aged pet owners, she couldn’t move the 40-pound delivery into her house.
“I’m guessing she knew someone on the force and called them to come by and help her move the dog food into her house. But it got us thinking: is this an outlier customer experience or an indicator of something bigger.”
Robbie and his team set off to find out. They analyzed mountains of customer service data, talked to service reps and soon learned that Jen was not alone in her struggle. Customers had reported difficulty moving heavy orders.
They took this knowledge to the product development team that, ultimately, developed a new box that had perforated handles. Jen and company could now lift and move heavy orders and police officers could get back to actual police work.
This small, collaborative innovation, driven by customer success data and a CX team given the freedom to explore had real business impact too. The perforated handles were a hit amongst customers. They had a measurable impact on loyalty and lifetime value. (This isn’t surprising since a Forrester study found that companies with mature customer success initiatives see, on average, 25% higher customer lifetime value.)
“It was this really great example of a CX team being able to dig into customer service data and then get other departments involved to actually drive operational improvement,” says Robbie. “But zooming out, that sort of relentless focus on the customer experience starts at the top and is core to a company’s culture. The Chewys and the Zappos of the world… They are customer obsessed.”
The Untapped Resource
Robbie’s experience at Chewy and in his current role VP of Ops role at hair, body and skincare brand, Truly Beauty, has taught him plenty, but one thing stands out:
Customer service data is one of the most untapped resources for driving operational improvements across the business.
Customer service data isn’t just noise. It isn’t just the output of a necessary expense. If used properly, it’s fuel for the brand and its products. The key to making it all work is the ops professional who can speak both ops and CX.
| What’s the Difference Between CS and CX? Good question. Customer service (or support) refers to the direct assistance a brand provides customers like responding to inbound emails, live chat or phone calls. Frontline stuff. Think of CX as the overall impression that accounts for every interaction, from initial awareness to post-purchase support and even loyalty program engagement. |
“That’s what makes an indispensable ops person. If you can understand the language, priorities, and pain points of both CX and ops, you become the person who can translate between them and actually make change happen. CX speaks in customer experience and sentiment, Ops speaks in processes, efficiency and numbers. The magic happens when you can take CX insights and frame them in a way that resonates with ops and vice versa. That’s when the new generation of leaders stops being just part of a department and starts driving company-wide impact.”
“There isn’t necessarily a formal way to learn to ‘speak CX.’ It’s about truly putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. Reading emails, listening to calls, and understanding the frustration and tone behind them in your area of focus. One of the most important foundations is ensuring CX has proper contact reasons in place so you can use that data to pinpoint key areas of focus for operational change. From there, learn the metrics that matter most to CX and how to interpret the ‘emotional’ side of the data.”
Mapping the full customer journey is critical for seeing the big picture and identifying operational pain points. It takes time and effort to build this skill, ops pros can nurture it by making the CX leader one of their closest work partners.
“Walk through the journey with them,” says Robbie. “They can share insights and you can bounce operational improvement ideas back and forth. This collaboration not only leads to smarter decisions but also makes the entire team feel included and empowered to create change. That energy is contagious, all the way down to the agent level.”
Ops Success is Rooted in Empathy and Data
“Earlier in my career I was at a company that did the StrengthFinders exercise where you answer a bunch of questions and the system turns back your leadership strengths. One of mine was empathy and I’ll never forget a colleague turning to me and saying, ‘You don’t see a lot of successful leaders with empathy as a core strength.’ Obviously, I wholly disagree. Empathy is about understanding people and what they experience. That is so vital when we’re talking about driving operational improvement.”
One of the exercises Robbie learned at Chewy and has implemented at Truly Beauty is Voice of the Customer, or VOC. It’s a quarterly initiative that pipes in all of the customer success data that the team examines through a human, or empathetic, lens to build customer stories.
What Metrics Power an Effective VOC?
Contact Rate
How many customers are reaching out as a percentage of orders. Think of it as a defect rate. Customers shouldn’t need to reach out if all goes perfectly.
Contact Reason
Why did the customer reach out? This needs to be perfected and outlines why they are reaching out. Generally, two layers of contact reasons will get you the best data
Return Reasons
Why did the customer make a return? Get super granular: Are things melting? Is the website not accurate? Is your carrier breaking items?
Quality Metrics
Track your net promoter score (NPS). This is less about the customer experience and more about how happy the consumer is with the brand as a whole. Also utilize your customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This tells you how happy the customer is with customer service’s response.
Operational Metrics
These are standard to normal ops functions and should be easy to pull: On Time Delivery (OTD), Order Accuracy Rates (OAR), Cost Per Contact (CPC), Refund to Sales Ratios and Carrier Level Issue Frequency. That last one maps out carrier-related returns by carrier, allowing you to narrow down problem carriers.
Start With Why
“When I’m standing up a VOC, I’m starting with the why. Why are we doing this? We’re doing this to ensure that the customer is at the center of every decision made throughout the business. Then we’re pulling in all that data and creating real stories, real narratives.”
From there, once a handful of stories are captured, the team has to investigate and get creative.
Here’s an example.
Truly Beauty knows that elevated damage rates with retailers is a cost of doing business. Or at least that’s what the team thought.
“We have glass products. The data says glass products get damaged more. That’s the norm.”
Not so. Retailer folks in the field reported that Truly Beauty product safety seals would always be all over the shelves – which makes sense: Truly Beauty’s stuff is super visual and appealing. Customers are drawn to it. They want to sniff and smell. Cracking them open is the only way to do that.
And that’s what was elevating damage rates: eager customers ripping through a too-easy-to-peel safety seal.
This wasn’t just a cost of doing business. It was a packaging improvement opportunity.
Robbie and his team worked with product development to restructure packaging. Safety seals were strengthened. Serums were put in unit cartons. Keeping the look, feel and weight of glass, the brand shifted to polyethylene terephthalate, or PET bottles that are less subject to breakage.
The packaging rework alone resulted in a 60 basis point reduction damage.
“We took the time to figure out customer behavior and it had measurable impact. That’s the VOC in action. And with samples, customers can still test products out.”
Each VOC looks back at the previous quarter’s VOC efforts (i.e., Here’s what we found. Here’s what we said we’d do. Did we do it? What were the outcomes?) They’re held quarterly because that’s how fast the customer can change.
“Doing VOC on such a regular basis keeps the team close to the customer. When an ops team always has a deep understanding of the customer, it can make smarter, more informed decisions.”
Is CX the Answer to All Operational Improvement?
Of course not. But the customer pays the bills so understanding them seems like a smart idea. Ops pros that do just that are poised to drive real change that can grow a brand’s bottom line and, perhaps more importantly, keep it relevant.