BoxyCharm revitalizes, rejuvenates the customer experience with Sunshine

Here’s an eye-opening fact: the beauty-products industry is worth more than $500 billion a year. That’s on par with the global sports industry, the entire German construction market, and is roughly three times the value of the video game industry.

From mascara to masks, eyeshadow to eyeliner, the average person spends thousands of dollars per year on a beauty regimen. And the market for those dollars is fierce—patrons of the beauty industry face a daunting range of products to choose from. Navigating that market while sticking to a budget can be a challenge.

This is where BoxyCharm comes in. Our monthly subscription service offers convenience, quality, and value—and it takes the mystery out of deciding which products to choose. Our team of beauty experts identifies established and up-and-coming products that help our customers look and feel great, and we offer them at affordable prices.

At the center of it all are our customers—whom we affectionately call Charmers. And while Charmers are certainly looking for value and variety, they also expect to be delivered an exceptional service experience.

We’re meeting those expectations by pushing our customer service into new territory, with a focus on providing omnichannel support, harnessing customer data, and creating a seamless and connected customer experience for our subscribers.

From enabling customers to reach out on the channel of their choosing—and importantly, giving them the ability to move from channel-to-channel with ease—to helping our support team work more efficiently, our goal is to offer personalized, faster support that will help BoxyCharm scale wisely into 2021 and beyond.

To get there, BoxyCharm needed the right strategic partner—one that’s trusted in the industry and has the functionality and know-how to help a maturing support organization realize its ambitious goals. Having outgrown our previous platform, we have since found that partner in Zendesk, which offers the reporting and power analytics BoxyCharm needs and a platform that will boost our support operation’s evolution.

BoxyCharm’s challenges

BoxyCharm’s search for a customer service solution didn’t come on a whim. It required a deep dive into every aspect of our support operation, and most importantly, time spent listening to our customers. Here are some of the challenges we discovered:

• Lack of omnichannel support. Previously, BoxyCharm had been operating with only email-based service and limited social media support. That meant our support organization was unable to provide customers with options that better suited their needs, such as self-service content.
• No visibility into real-time interactions. We were unable to see if a Charmer had opened an email, reached out to the shipping carrier, or had taken any other action prior to reaching out to our team. That lack of customer context translated to more touches per customer—leading to higher support costs—and unnecessary friction for customers who expect BoxyCharm’s agents to have more detailed information on hand.
• Siloed customer data. Not having a unified, omnichannel support tool in place made it difficult for agents to combat replacement abuse (for claims of incorrectly shipped products) and for the company to pursue customer retention efforts. Combined with lack of clarity into billing issues and an overreliance on spreadsheets, BoxyCharm faced too many manual processes internally, which translated to pain points for customers, as well.
  For example, agents were forced to toggle between multiple systems just to get an idea of who the customer was and what their journey has been like, rather than having a centralized view. Meanwhile, an entire team was dedicated to managing spreadsheets for voucher codes and returns. All that manual work took up the time of several full-time employees and prevented BoxyCharm from scaling wisely.
• Reporting as a pain point. When I joined BoxyCharm as vice president of customer experience, I quickly began asking for reporting and analytics from our platform provider. The result was discouraging—it took my team many hours to get what I needed because the platform couldn’t produce rich analytics. That was a major problem that led to the decision to migrate to Zendesk. Without easy access to granular data about BoxyCharm’s support operations, our efforts to improve service would have been extraordinarily difficult.

Where BoxyCharm is going

Identifying what wasn’t working, while important, was only part of BoxyCharm’s efforts to improve the customer experience. We understood that forming a clear vision where we wanted to be—both in the short-term and long-term—would be crucial to providing the kind of service our customers demand.

Here’s where we landed: BoxyCharm wants to create an end-to-end, quality experience that customers love—not just the products in the box, but the delivery process itself as well as interactions with support. This goes well beyond simply adopting an omnichannel solution; it’s about building a single, unified view of the customer.

To accomplish this, we plan to make the most of Zendesk’s CX platform, Sunshine. Here’s a peek at how we’ll tap into Sunshine’s powerful functionality:

1. 
   Using the Sunshine APIs, we’ll be able to integrate data from our business tools (such as Magento) and get a full view of a Charmer’s past interactions, billing details, and other pertinent customer information.
2. 
   Goodbye to spreadsheets: with the help of Sunshine Custom Objects and the Zendesk App Marketplace, we’re going to transform our unorganized, time-consuming voucher retrieval process in spreadsheets to be a one-click process. That will enable the support team to redirect resources where they’re needed, rather than simply increasing headcount to manage inefficient processes.
3. 
   As our customer service vision expands, we want to harness the power of automation. For example, that means being able to automatically tag customers who are impacted by shipping issues. As Zendesk continues to expand the functionality of Sunshine over the next year, those automation features will also help us with retention efforts for at-risk accounts, as well as ticket routing, deflection, and creating opportunities for proactive support. As we build this functionality, we know that Zendesk will be there every step of the way to find new ways to solve problems.
4. 
   Finally, BoxyCharm will use the data made available by Sunshine to better understand customer trends and demographics. Because Zendesk provides the flexibility to use the right tool for the right job—namely, with its extensive integrations with third-party tools—we can leverage our existing technology to gather the kind of customer insights our business needs. As a customer support leader, knowing that we have a platform that works so well with our existing tools is a relief—and being able to access the data in those tools in a centralized location goes a long way toward improving our efficiency as a team.

The journey doesn’t end here

As BoxyCharm moves into 2021, we have a clear vision of our goals and the challenges we’ll face in providing the kind of rich customer experience our Charmers deserve. And by leaning into omnichannel support and taking advantage of a trove of unified customer data, our support team will be better able to work more efficiently and provide the kind of proactive, personalized support our customers demand.

By its very nature, the beauty industry constantly evolves as styles and customer trends shift—much like how customer support continues to change and grow. At BoxyCharm, we’re embracing change so that our customers get not just the best in beauty products but the best in world-class service.