At A Glance

Ashley Harris is the CX guru at Andie, where elegance and individual attention collide! Find out how her distinct background and practical approach are changing the way that customer care is provided for swimwear. Her narrative demonstrates the value of developing trust as well as the strategies for succeeding during seasonal sales peaks.

Who Is Ashley?

Meet Ashley, CX Manager at Andie!

About Andie

Andie is a luxury swimsuit brand, made for women by women, offering first-class fit experts to help women find the perfect Andie. While Andie maintains its flagship store in Malibu, California, today most sales are online.

Ashley’s CX Journey

Initially, Ashley began studying forensic psychology but realized that in order to make herself a career in that field, she would need significantly more schooling. So, she pivoted to CX to be able to help others right away!

She started her CX career working at Quip, the subscription-based oral hygiene company, in their early days as one of the first 30 employees. She loved working in the start-up environment, so when the opportunity arose at Andie, Ashley jumped on it!

Women’s swimwear, she says, holds some similarities to dental hygiene, as they both require customer service agents to speak with customers about vulnerable topics concerning their bodies.

“When a customer is vulnerable, the most important thing is to build trust.”

CX at Andie is focused on providing personal shopping guidance as well as fit and style consultations.

Structure Of The Andie Team

Ashley’s team is comprised of herself, 3 internal remote agents, and one full-time off-shore agent, plus a seasonal overflow team. Ashley supervises the efforts of all agents and occasionally jumps in to assist with inbound customer service requests as well.

Andie maintains office space in Brooklyn, but remote video/phone contact enables the agents to offer a better quality of support. The office environment can be noisy and destroy the intimate ambiance needed to discuss fit issues. If the customer can hear other people talking, she might feel too vulnerable to discuss her body type, weight, and measurements—all very personal subjects for women, according to Ashley.

The flexibility afforded by working from home makes her team members feel more valued. Traditional CX is often the most non-flexible division of a company.

Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing CX

Overall, ResolvedCX was a good choice for Andie Swim. They are flexible and quick with feedback, Ashley notes. The cons, she says, are less corporate loyalty and less commitment to the brand. Andie plans to use them again next year during peak season while keeping their limitations in mind when onboarding the next set of agents.

An added benefit is reducing burnout among the full-time agents, where the churn rate industry-wide is 60 percent. A committed team, like ResolvedCX, lets Andie better service the customer during the seasonal peak and quickly scale back again.

CX At Andie

Early on, Ashley realized that customers do not really want to contact customer service, so she made it her focus to build relationships with customers and not just facilitate a transaction.

She believes CX must be about more than negative interactions. It’s possible to use CX to prevent potential complaints on the front end, proactively. Good CX can benefit the bottom line, leading to fewer returns and more customer loyalty. CX is the frontline of customer information that can be passed to other teams, such as Marketing, Product, and E-Commerce. When CX can show the bulk of questions are about the product’s fit, E-Commerce has the opportunity to point the directive at the online shopping interface.

Ultimately, Ashley says, CX should be less focused on deflecting and more focused on relationship building. Thoughtful, empathetic CX is the goal.

CX Challenges In The Seasonal Sales Space

In the swimwear space, peak sales in the US occur from May to just past Labor Day. Andie does new product launches all year round, which affects CX volume to a degree, but the peak is still 3-4 times the usual volume. Remarkably, they don’t have a fall/winter holiday season peak, however, they do market in Australia, which adds its own ripple to the volume wave.

This year for the first time, the CX team at Andie prepared in April for the start of the peak season, first by leveraging a BPO partner for off-shore agents. In previous years, Andie had hired its own domestic temp agents, but the temps were working with the hope of converting to full-time. Since that wasn’t feasible, after a month or two, they would leave for other opportunities. This attrition, coupled with the seasonal volume, hurt the CX KPIs.

This year, with ResolvedCX onboard, ramp-up started a month early. Getting the temp agents up to speed on care scenarios and new product lines made them less stressed and more successful in their jobs. Andie’s customer service hours are  21/7, and ResolvedCX is the fulcrum that levels the hours.

Ashley’s Thoughts On AI In CX

AI was considered at Andie, but the bulk of CX interactions were seen to require more personalization and not many patterns could be discerned from the CX data. Two women, for example, might be the same size, but they want swimwear for different activities, like sports or lounging, so fit recommendations will differ.

AI, at this stage in development, can’t facilitate complex interactions like these, Ashley says. AI is useful for summarizing information, tagging an issue, and getting a contact with the most qualified agent, she adds.

How Ashley Quality-Checks Agents And The CX Experience

A good Andie customer service agent, first and foremost, should be someone who is empathetic, according to Ashley, The agent should be flexible, have an interest in fashion, and want to be an expert in Andie products.

At Andie, metrics are tracked company-wide, but on an individual CX agent basis, KPIs center around efficiency. Ashley has a handle on first-call resolution, average handle time, and CSAT, though she doesn’t hold firm to CSAT because, while helpful, it is more based on systems and processes versus individual success.

On a team level, she tracks average wait time, customer effort score, and average resolution time, which tells her how prolonged the conversations are before purchase.

She focuses on analyzing returns to improve efficiency, identifying opportunities in both E-Commerce and CX. Occasionally, she encounters atypical issues, such as customers discussing non-product topics. By tracking these trends, she can secure resources for her department. About 10-15% of her time is spent on assessing contact sessions for efficiency, leading to tools like macros for new question categories. In the off-season, she conducts intensive training with her team to enhance CX interactions and introduce new tools.

Ashley and her team also monitor customer product feedback. CX will reach out to customers leaving 3-star product reviews and try to resolve any fit or style issues. She is also looking at ways to reward Andie’s most loyal customers as well.

This comprehensive, subjective data mining approach can drive revenue through CX, she notes.

CX Tech Stack

Gladly “I really like that Glady approaches [CX] from a conversational point.”

Boutiq The team at Andie uses Boutiq for video fitting sessions with customers.

Loop

Okendo

Attentive

Klaviyo