1. Know your team and customers: Rosina emphasizes understanding both employees and customers to foster effective communication and motivation, leading to smoother operations and better service.
2. Regular communication is key: Rosina stresses weekly meetings with her team to address challenges and achievements, ensuring continuous improvement and preventing issues from lingering.
3. Empathy drives good leadership: Empathetic leadership builds trust within the team, motivating them and fostering a supportive work environment, which Rosina believes is crucial for any department.
4. Cross-training enhances efficiency: By involving the CX team in other tasks like cutting and shipping, they become more equipped to handle customer queries, improving customer satisfaction and reducing complaints.
5. Collaborate closely with marketing: CX and marketing teams share vital information, aligning customer insights with sales strategies to guide customers better through their purchasing journey.
Rosina Cavano's visionary leadership at Fuse Lenses is revolutionizing customer service. Her dedication to comprehending her team and consumers, together with her innovative use of technology and marketing teamwork, create a customer experience that is both distinctively positive and productive.
Rosina Cavano is the Director of Customer Service at Fuse Lenses!
Fuse Lenses cuts and fits high-quality sunglasses lenses while also selling their own affordable, yet equally high-quality, frames. As an outdoor lifestyle company, they understand the value their customers place on finding an accessory that protects themselves. With a team of 30, Fuse Lenses operates as both an E-Commerce and retail company.
From the Marine Corps to the restaurant industry to banking to her now seven-year tenure at Fuse Lenses, Rosina has learned to interact with and appreciate a wide range of personalities. She’s been in customer service most of her life and at one point felt stuck in her CX journey.
“I thought, ‘I’m never getting out of this field!” she says. Over time, her annoyance turned to embrace. “Now I enjoy it because you can see how much of an impact you have on people’s lives,” she adds.
She began impacting lives at Fuse Lenses as a customer service rep, quickly rising up to lead their CS team. “It’s been an exciting journey because we’re growing as a company,” she says. “And now I have a team that I’ve been helping grow.”
Her extensive time in CX has shown her the lack of quality in customer service. “Most people have really bad customer service experiences nowadays,” she says, “so it’s rare when you get people who actually care about you.”
With this knowledge, she now continues her CX journey by facilitating her team’s growth and giving them the confidence they need to in turn give customers a uniquely amazing, genuinely positive customer service experience.
Fuse Lenses relies on a tight team of four, all local to the company, to address customers’ needs. This team of four not only handles customer requests online but also manages the storefront in Clearwater, FL.
While it is unique to have a customer service team working both in-store and online customer service, Rosina says it has allowed them to maintain leanness in the CX team while also empowering each person to do more than just answer customer service tickets on a daily basis.
With an emphasis on cross-training and interdepartmental collaboration, the CX team is able to impact other areas of the business team. They are an integral part of the entire process throughout the year.
Beyond addressing needs as they come, during their slow season (October–April), they spend their time optimizing their processes to maximize their efficiency. During peak summer season, however, the CS team takes a unique approach to keeping the customer happy …
Rather than a disjointed effort to please the customer, they join the rest of the company in the lab to actually cut, clean, and ship the lenses. “It helps minimize the ‘Where’s my order?’ emails,” she explains. For Fuse Lenses, even operational tasks are seen as opportunities to maintain positive customer experiences.
Because of this collaboration, the CX team is even more equipped to handle customers. “When they reach out to us pre-purchase, we’re very helpful in explaining how that process works,” she says. Post-purchase, they are better able to address negative reviews, making sure the customer is 100% satisfied with their purchase.
Her team is fully invested in both the product and the process, making for effective customer service.
Rosina’s team clearly doesn’t operate in a bubble. But beyond production, her department also has close ties to the marketing team, which makes sense—both groups must understand the customer.
“We had to narrow down the type of customer that we attract. So we created a few different profiles and tried to figure out how you market to that person,” she says. Now, the CX team knows exactly who they’re talking to, whether it’s their avid sunglasses enthusiast, their sporty customer, or their everyday user.
It’s a symbiotic relationship between CX and marketing. “We give them the information we’re getting from customers to identify pain points and tag certain emails when they try something that might confuse the customer,” she says. Meanwhile, the marketing team shares sales information along with messaging changes that may impact CX.
Beyond email campaigns, marketing and CX go hand in hand across multiple company efforts. Giveaways, goody bags, postcards, and influencer messages both educate and engage customers, both new and returning. Each marketing strategy is an opportunity for CX to then prepare and guide the customer through the purchasing journey.
Rosina is a self-taught student of psychology, always learning to understand others. So, her strength as a leader is in the knowing. “Just like knowing your customer, knowing your employees is the biggest thing,” she says, “and when it comes to your team, it’s super helpful to know how they learn best and what motivates them.”
She reaches this level of understanding of her employees in a variety of ways. For instance, she meets weekly with her team individually to discuss challenges along with their achievements. “Communication is huge,” she says. Regular communication allows her team to make corrections in the moment instead of letting it fester. It allows her to nail down who her team members are and what drives them.
Beyond communication, she leads her team with empathy, taking their needs to heart to help them get through any issues they’re experiencing.
“Having that trust that the person working with them is going to look out for them is really big in any department,” she says.
Asana
Attentive
Gorgias: “I really like Gorgias because of how it works well with all the other platforms. We don't have to leave it as much to go do anything else.”
Loyalty Lions
Okendo
Shopify
Slack
While interested in its possibilities, Rosina doesn’t quite see a space for AI beyond ChatGPT at Fuse Lenses just yet.
“I started using ChatGPT to help with our macros to improve wording or tone, but because we do more exchanges than returns, we run into issues where it might misunderstand what it’s supposed to do,” she explains.
Can’t-Live-Without-Tool: Slack.
Key Hiring Trait: Empathy, positivity, curiosity, and love of the outdoors — “In order to sell the product, you have to live it, too.”
Favorite Book or Podcast: “Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Gudara and “Reality-Based Leadership” by Cy Wakeman.
AI or No AI?: Not yet.
Number #1 Challenge as a CX Leader: “Getting over that hump of learning everybody’s personalities and what drives them. Once you learn that, it’s pretty easy from there on.”
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