Case Study: Lulu and Georgia Decrease FRT by 22% With Assembled

Lulu and Georgia designs and curates the best in interiors to inspire homes.

Challenges

When AI-powered support solutions started gaining traction, Fabiola saw an opportunity to elevate her team’s workflow. She identified a clear first step: leveraging AI to instantly analyse content, context, and sentiment, ensuring tickets were routed to the right agents from the start.

After testing several AI tools, the team found that the results didn’t match the hype. Tickets were being missed, customer intent was often misinterpreted, and the tools lacked the features needed to fine-tune AI performance.

At the same time, Fabiola saw an opportunity to expand AI’s potential beyond case routing – exploring its impact on agent performance and case automation.

While her team had been using a basic AI tool to draft responses, the results felt generic, and the options were too limited to make a meaningful difference.

Fabiola Esquivel, Director of Customer Experience, said, “We think that CX is still very person-forward, and we want to maintain that human touch. So we approached our AI implementation by asking the question, ‘How can we make AI helpful to our agents and improve their experience?’”

Solution

What set Assembled Assist apart was its ability to tackle case categorization, agent assistance, and full automation – all in one solution.

Other tools fell short, addressing only parts of the team’s needs and lacking the flexibility to manage their nuanced, often complex cases.

On top of that, Assist seamlessly integrated with tools like Zendesk, Google Drive, and Shopify, while offering robust dashboards to track AI’s impact in real time.

One of Fabiola’s top priorities was streamlining their damaged item process. Furniture orders are already a logistical challenge – coordinating distant vendors, navigating import issues, and shipping oversized, bulky items are just a few friction points.

When customers receive damaged furniture, emotions can run high, making it crucial to de-escalate quickly and resolve the issue efficiently.

Without AI, the process involved numerous manual steps: requesting photos from the customer, filing claims with suppliers, arranging refunds or replacements, offering discounts, and more. It was a lot to manage – even before factoring in the added pressure of an upset customer.

With Assist, the team automated several steps of the damaged item process, ensuring customers felt heard while their cases moved through the system faster.

Human agents no longer had to manage every step, freeing them to focus on what they do best: empathizing with and supporting customers.

The best part? The team could design their own workflows using Assist’s intuitive features, making process automation seamless and adaptable to their needs.

With so many steps, staying on top of a single case could get overwhelming – a heavy lift for any agent. That’s where Assist’s auto-summary feature comes in. It quickly provides agents with a clear, concise overview of a case, making it easier to ensure seamless coverage and consistent support.

Laura Shibley, Customer Experience Manager, said, “Assist is just so helpful. It saves the agent so much time having to explain to a colleague what’s been going on over the past 60 days with a really complex issue.

The scope of everything that it can do with no effort is just such a nice thing. It’s great knowing that someone can click this button, and Assist is going to do so many things for them.”

Results

Today, Assist plays a central role in Lulu and Georgia’s support operations, handling tickets across a variety of topics like order modifications, return policies, showroom visits, and international orders. It’s like having an on-demand team member – always ready to step in and keep things running seamlessly.

As a result of implementing auto-sends, first response time (FRT) decreased by 22%, and the time from first assignment to solution was reduced by 18% over the course of nine months.

Fabiola Esquivel, Director of Customer Experience, said, “Agents are less scared of escalations, but if things do get heated Assist makes it easier to de-escalate customers. It’s especially helpful if an agent is having a bad day.”

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Assembled – View the Original Article

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Assembled is a Support Operations platform that helps companies maintain exceptional customer experiences, no matter what lies ahead. Leading brands use Assembled's workforce and vendor management capabilities to make optimal staffing decisions, gain visibility into performance and productivity, and unlock new ways to serve evolving customer needs.

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Author: Assembled
Reviewed by: Megan Jones