Anneliese Field is the Customer Experience Manager at Love in Faith and its sister company, God’s Love Overcomes (GLO).
Love and Faith and God’s Love Overcomes make a wide variety of Christian apparel and other products like journals and jewelry. As a faith-based company, they understand the importance of living your faith, and they want customers to have the opportunity.
Since adolescence, apparel and customer service have defined Anneliese’s professional experience. After working at Nordstrom and Saks in high school, she studied fashion merchandising at Cal State Long Beach, where she interned for brands like Quiksilver and Roxy. However, after taking a three-year break from the workforce when her son was born, she was ready to return once he was older.
“This is kind of how I got into it. I got a [seasonal] job as a customer experience rep for a company, and that’s how I first got into CX. It kind of turned into me becoming a manager.”
As a shopper and, above all, a mother, Anneliese’s approach to CX is guided by the fact there will always be a multitude of places where you experience customer service, and most importantly, she wants to have a pleasant experience that makes her feel good.
“It’s always such a great experience to have great customer service, whether at a restaurant or whether you need help with shopping online. To be able to make customers happy and give them a really lasting, memorable experience speaking to customer service or a team, that's just amazing. I know how important it is to other people.”
Furthermore, she also agrees that customer experience is a very disarming experience that can provide important life lessons, especially when dealing with difficult clients.
“It’s hard to not give the same energy back to the person you're speaking to, but when you’re the bigger person, it makes for a better experience, and it's crazy how you can see the situation turn around, and the super upset customer is loving you.”
Currently, Anneliese oversees fourteen team members, two of which do customer service on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and all of whom are remote in the Philippines. “It’s mostly for cost savings. That’s the reason.”
As she acknowledges, the biggest challenge isn’t only the time difference, but also ensuring that the team is committed to working on U.S. time, especially as the company grows and introduces more channels, which is difficult since the company currently offers customer service only through email. Still, technology makes things easier, and they take advantage of it. Everything is done via Slack as far as follow-ups or performance reviews or anything like that. When Anneliese trains her team on something, it’s helpful for her to take videos of herself walking them through it because she’s not there to train in person. “You know, I record my screen and then I’ll voice over it and then just send that through: Hey, guys, we launched something new, here's how to do it.”
However, Anneliese also acknowledges the significant problems of working so remotely. Since she’s not in person, it’s not easy to hold team meetings and hold them accountable to KPIs and manage the team when it's purely virtual communication, which sometimes means that her team can't really get what she’s saying due to the tech barrier.
Currently, Anneliese’s team doesn’t offer live chat, phone calls, or SMS for customer service, but she’s looking forward to expanding since “the company is growing so quickly,” and “We're realizing that we need to offer more areas of support.” Currently, however, email is fine for God’s Love Overcomes and Love in Faith, mostly because “we didn’t have the bandwidth we do to now, to introduce other channels of support.” Ultimately, she acknowledges that her unique situation is why her customer service channels might seem so limited to some. Without a customer experience manager like herself, there was no one here to facilitate additional channels of support, which left the team in a kind of limbo when they couldn’t do it themselves. As such, that was why they wanted to keep everything in-house and steer clear of temp agencies.
“That's why we decided to stick with what we know and then make sure we're all good there and then expand,” Anneliese says.
Because Love in Faith is completely virtual, it also guides their customer experience. If clients aren’t reaching out to them directly, the company just introduces automation via live chat and the FAQ section on their help center, and a contact form. The company is most familiar with the platforms they most use, so they try to maximize their benefits as much as possible.
Furthermore, most of their business is on Facebook, which is another huge factor because of the network’s nature and how you can order from there. They recognize that doing so might seem a little sketchy, so their focus is to give customers as much information as possible pre-purchase to make them feel good and that the company is legit, especially by adding in automation flows.
Indeed, one of their main strategies is for the social media team to reply to every comment that existing customers leave to reassure new ones and give them peace of mind.
Naturally, their biggest focus is on the flows and automation. If clients go to their website, they’ll see the chat widget on there from Love in Faith, which can answer a variety of questions.
According to Anneliese, “It's going to have the top flows on there. It's going to be pre-purchase. It's going to be, when are you restocking the item? What's my size? How do I apply my promo code?” As such, this helps love and not only manage their customer flow much more effectively, but also to retain them through reasonable deals and a reward system. Even if a previous customer doesn’t buy anything from Love in Faith, they’ll be notified that they still might be able to redeem some of their points for a code for $5 to $20 off, for example. By building on these flows, Love in Faith can best see if they answer some of the customers’ most common questions.
And since the advent of AI is now on everyone’s mind, Anneliese has a plan for it, using it to grow her business as much as possible.
“Something we do is make sure our articles and help center are refined enough to be a correct match to what the customer is asking. I know what we're trying to do is make sure the macros are really specific, and that links to AI in the sense that it's trying to predict what the customer is saying and link it to the correct article.”
Above all, Anneliese’s dedication to customer service guides her well in navigating one of the most significant business developments in a generation, and she’s eager to make a positive impact on those she serves.
In most business situations, leaders know what it’s like to be in beginner positions because they started there, too, and it’s the same for Anneliese.
“It’s probably a good day a week of answering our inquiries myself so I know how it is to be a team member. I get a firsthand feel for what our customers are saying, how easy our process is, or if there's anything that needs to be fixed with our macros. It helps me get a feel for what the team is experiencing.
As the Customer Experience Leader at Love in Faith, Anneliese has undoubtedly changed the company for the better, especially since virtual entities must be much more conscientious of customer communication. “I mean, I think I've changed a ton of processes here. We were pretty strict on returns. If you don't reach out to us within seven days of it being delivered, we're not going to help you. But then I like sometimes I'll look like, okay, wait, the customer spent a lot, right? They have like 20 plus orders with us. Are we really willing to not serve them?
Because of this change in attitude, the team has had to be more flexible about the policy and use their best judgment in every situation, especially in regards to the ability to read the conversation and get the customer’s vibe. For her part, Anneliese has stressed that she'll never get mad at her employees, and that she knows things might be a little different every day.
Yes, Anneliese understands the importance of firmness in business, but her flexible policy has ensured that customers are not only comfortable buying from the brand, but also that they’re being taken into account when it matters.
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Monday.com
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Time Doctor
As a faith-based company, their products attract a lot of attention, and many customers want to make sure they never miss a beat.
We have about maybe 30,000 subscribers to our Bible box.”
It includes a t-shirt with an unreleased design, a gift card, and a bookmark. Since it’s a monthly little expense , it’s mostly a token of the company’s appreciation for their customers, which is always an excellent way to let them know that they’re being listened to. Beyond that, Love in Faith also has another membership option where for $9.95 per month, they can have discounted pricing on the website.” Since Love in Faith’s clients mean so much to them, it’s nice that they know they can access such great benefits for a very reasonable price, which surely adds to the feeling of community.
Can’t-Live-Without-Tool: The ability to tag tickets. “It provides so much insight into what our top issues are and what our customers are reaching out to us about.”
Key Hiring Trait: Confidence, intelligence, and good judgment.
Favorite Communication Channel: Live Chat.
Number #1 Challenge as CX Leader: Repetitiveness and not enough growth opportunities. “I think that's a challenge just providing opportunities for growth for our team. For me, I introduce focused areas to our team, which are different aspects of the business. You don't have to stay as a rep the whole time, and so that's a challenge. Sometimes they feel like if there's no emails in our inbox, there’s no work for them, and that’s not true at all.”
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