Honeylove shapes its success with CX data and SMS innovation

Honeylove, founded in 2018, is a fashion brand with a mission to embolden women of all shapes and sizes through its line of high-quality clothing. After four years of steady growth and success, Honeylove was aiming to increase its base of satisfied customers even further.

The brand took an innovative data-driven approach leveraging Zendesk integrations and created the best omnichannel CX experience possible through phone, SMS texting, Instagram and Facebook messaging, email, and web ticket forms. As a result, Honeylove has expanded its product line to include tops, bras, leggings, and many other garments that set new standards for their verticals.

A customer-centric approach across all channels

Striving to meet its customers where they are, Honeylove turned to Zendesk Suite to provide a more engaging experience across multiple customer channels. Today the customer service team handles around 50 percent of its support volume through email and web forms, 30 percent through voice, and 20 to 30 percent through SMS (texting) and social media.

With Zendesk, the support team now has the option to do marketing through SMS, instead of just email. Many customers already use SMS (texting) so it’s a natural choice for Honeylove support communications–especially urgent messages, such as shipping updates on garments for special occasions or weddings.

This customer-centric approach has also enabled Honeylove to continue growing in the highly competitive direct-to-consumer (DTC) garment industry.

Cultivating success with stronger data

The most valuable part of this approach is having all those customer interactions recorded and stored in one place—creating a rich repository of customer data that drives business decisions.

“We are extremely data-driven. We have new iterations of our clothing line coming out often, and we base a lot of those changes on customer feedback,” says Trevor Humphrey, VP of Customer Experience at Honeylove.

The data has also proved useful in providing guidance for greater efficiencies in serving customers. “The voice of the customer data from Zendesk is so powerful, we’ve been able to work smarter and cut unnecessary steps from the CX process,” says Humphrey. “That ultimately helps reduce return rates and increase customer retention.”

Customized workflows increase efficiency and customer satisfaction

Zendesk also enabled Honeylove to design custom fields to classify common queries and issues. Case types are identified and prioritized based on volume and urgency, which helps agents manage their personal workloads and quickly assist customers. The team’s average response time is currently 16 minutes for SMS, the channel of choice for many Honeylove customers.

“Zendesk is the gold standard when it comes to delivering a great customer experience and becoming more efficient as a team,” says Humphrey. “Reducing our contact rate and handle times has improved customer satisfaction, including a CSAT of 96 percent for SMS support and 93 percent for email support.”

Powerful integrations make it easy to stay agile

Seamless integrations with different tools also enabled Honeylove to improve the customer and agent experience at scale. One of these tools is Klaviyo, a marketing automation platform for email and SMS.

“The Klaviyo integration allows Honeylove to be much smarter and more mindful about how and when we interact with customers,” says Humphrey. For instance, customers do not receive marketing outreach if they have an open ticket or issue with the company.

Because Zendesk’s interface is so user-friendly, Humphrey was able to set up Klaviyo within the existing ecosystem in just 15 minutes. A self-described non-techie, Humphrey appreciates how Zendesk offers simple customizations that enable Honeylove agents to do their best work. “I have the keys to the castle,” Humphrey shares. “With Zendesk, I can go into the admin portal and easily customize the platform in minutes. It’s very intuitive and streamlined, which is important for a relatively young company that needs to stay super agile as the business evolves.”

“A customer expects the brand to know who they are, what they’ve done, and how to communicate in a genuine way,” adds Humphrey. “Before integrating Klaviyo, there was a whole missing piece of data around the customer support experience that we didn’t have on the marketing side. Now those two sides of the business are aligned.”

Other integrations include Shopify for e-commerce and WorkRamp for knowledge management. The Shopify integration enables Honeylove to harness even more data for its product development and customer service teams. The marketing team can also use the information on customer purchase history to create campaigns with more targeted offers. WorkRamp, on the other hand, helps Honeylove’s agents search for standard operating procedures and process guides, which streamlines the interactions between agents and customers.

A flexible solution to support future growth

Working with Zendesk has enabled Humphrey to share the voice of the customer with Honeylove’s executive team, which is a key ingredient in the brand’s success. He explains, “Getting hard data to support anecdotal customer input reinforces how we make business decisions, such as where we should be spending our time and energy.”

Humphrey sees great potential for future growth at Honeylove, thanks to its flexible CX platform. “Whether we have 30 agents or 3000 agents, Zendesk will have the right solution for us,” Humphrey affirms. “Zendesk is a great partner that continues to share best practices with us, so we can identify current trends, understand what’s coming down the pipeline, and plan for the future.”