At A Glance

Francesca Maramonte use's creativity and sensitivity, to elevate Happy Head's customer service to the pinnacle of perfection. Francesca exhibits excellent leadership while overseeing a rapidly expanding worldwide team, managing QA procedures, and utilizing AI to improve customer experiences. Explore her narrative to see how she's changing consumer satisfaction in a long-lasting way!

Who Is Francesca?

Meet Francesca, the Customer Service Manager at Happy Head!

About Happy Head

Happy Head produces custom hair growth formulas for men, women, and all hair types.

Francesca’s CX Journey

Pivoting from an environmental science undergrad degree, Francesca’s interest in the beauty sphere pointed the way to Happy Head. She felt drawn to the startup culture and saw a leadership opportunity.

“Happy Head, when it was starting, was super exciting. I joined the CX department 2 years ago when there were only two other agents,” she says. “Now the team is about 22. I’ve been growing into the management role,” she says. “That startup spirit,” she added, “is very collaborative.”

The CX Team At Happy Head

Happy Head employs approximately six agents and a QA in Los Angeles. They utilize a customer operations team in Manila, Philippines, as well as an offshore customer service team in Davao, Philippines. “One of the women who leads the customer operations team has been with us even before I joined. They do a lot of the back-end work, making sure orders are smooth on the customer side. We acquired, in June, an offshore team, and they’re great. Awesome CX has the same company spirit as Happy Head.”

The distributed CX team gives Happy Head some earlier morning coverage, night coverage, and overnight coverage.

The QA works out of the LA office and QA’s the domestic and the offshore team. “We came up with a rubric, and he holds monthly meetings and everything,” she says. “Our standard is to meet 90 percent, and with our team, it’s very easy meeting that or well above.”

The QA looks for qualities by channel. “If it’s a written channel, the grammar is important,” she says. “If phones, it is tone and vocabulary. Are they being empathetic?” He’s also looking for specific contact elements. “Are they greeting? Are they closing correctly? Are they following up properly on the back end? If a customer asked, ‘Where’s my order?’ and the agent said, ‘It’s shipping soon,’ did the agent set a reminder to actually follow up with the tracking number?”

CX Training At Happy Head

“Our agents—we call them hair specialists—get 4 or 5 days of initial training, including system training, doctor knowledge, product knowledge, and possible side effects but this is included in product knowledge,” Francesca says. “When they are talking to the customers, they can let them know clinically what’s going on. A board-certified dermatologist makes the official change to the formula if that’s the case.”

“Our two founding dermatologists are in our business park in L.A. One goes live twice a month with an Ask Me Anything. That’s how I get a lot of knowledge, and I’m able to update our knowledge docs, our macros.”

Francesa passes the knowledge to her agents. “I’ll send out quizzes to the agents about topical ingredients and formulations we offer. It’s really important to keep the hair specialists up to date with our systems, but they also need to know about hair, hair care, shedding, thinning, so they can instill confidence in our customers,” she says. “I really press empathy and tone during our phone training or live chat training,” she says. “Customers may come in angry or feeling insecure. They’re not always the nicest to the agent, but we can turn that into something positive, something happy, and get them feeling confident.”

She encourages the agents to share their successes. “We had one agent, who brought in so many reviews, I asked, ‘Can you give a 5-minute presentation at the weekly meeting? What’s your secret sauce?’ I think seeing positive reviews motivates our agents. We post it for everyone to see. It’s not always monetary, but even having that recognition…”, she muses. “I think it goes a long way.”

Working With An Outsourced Team

Francesca says that working with an outsourced team has enhanced the customers’ CX experience. “I feel like acquiring them has allowed our team to grow. Their perspective has added a lot to our responses. They’re super welcoming,” she says about the team, adding “Their roles are flexible. If we need some of them to help with customer operations or help with something else, they can do that.”

While team meetings are mainly remote, Francesca has visited the Philippines and spent time absorbing their business and social culture. “When I went out there, I actually worked the night shift. Being able to step in their shoes, work overnight, eat the food, learn the language…,” she mused, “I feel like I was able to connect with them.”

Adding the offshore team gives Francesca the ability to differentiate the agent roles. She can decide who does inbound and outbound, along with which channels are used. “We have certain outbound lists at Happy Head. One example is, in order to get the prescription, we require photos. Someone has to do follow-up. We have a social media team, too. Outsourcing let us play around with not only meeting the bare minimum but ensuring we stand out and meet the customer’s request before it even gets there,” she says.

KPIs Francesca Is Tracking

Francesca’s team tracks top performance. “Are they accepting 100% of the chats that come in their queue? Are they answering 100% of the calls? Are they staying online and available at least 85% of their scheduled time? Are they responding within 30 seconds or less?” She adds, “90 percent CSAT is our standard.”

She also asks the bigger question: What is CX bringing outside of KPIs? “I look for behaviors,” she says, of her agents. “Are they able to retain the customers? Are they bringing in reviews on Trust Pilot? Are they keeping the customer up to date, even if the system is loading, like saying, ‘Hi, I’m still here.’ Are they a team player? And are they bringing ideas to the table at the weekly meeting that can be new macro suggestions?”

Francesca believes in incentivization to boost performance. “Weekly, we have a top metrics performer and a top behavior performer. Monthly, we choose Hair Specialists of the Month. “I call it my happy incentives,” she says. “It could be a raffle or it could be five dollars for a five-star,” she says. “The first person to hit five Trust Pilot reviews gets a free lunch. In the Philippines, they can pick an Ariana Grande perfume or a Taylor Swift shirt—something American pop culture, which they love—as a quarterly incentive. I also implemented some group incentives. We recently hit our 4.0, and celebrated as a team.” She adds, “It’s fun for me to get to see the healthy competition.”

Tech Stack

Zendesk

Stripe

WooCommerce

Hootsuite

Slack

MD Integration – The MD Integration platform handles the medical side of Happy Head’s operations. “We have two types of customers. One type knows what ingredients they want and one type has no idea, it’s their first time. They get the prescription from the doctor. They click start, answer questions, submit pictures, and then they get assigned to our doctors—all are board-certified dermatologists, which stands us out from our competitors,” she boasts, adding “They get free, ongoing support from that board-certified dermatologist. Any time they want to change their formula or add a different product, the derm is there to help them. We can customize formulas.”

AI or Not To AI?

“Incorporating AI, we have a chat bot with help articles. If a customer clicks cancel, it’ll let them know the options and connect them with live chat, if necessary. It’s the same with the phone and IVR, we’ll give you options,” she says. “It’s important to have a live agent for both phone and chat. When they hear their options in real time, boom, they don’t want to cancel.”

Support channels at Happy Head are geared to the customer demographic. “We do have older patients, so that’s why phones are high priority right now,” she says. “AI is to empower our agents more and help us be as efficient as possible. So, we’re open to it.”