The power of listening: 3 ways Lush drives brand growth with CX

1. Unlock the future of CX with AI

As early adopters of AI in CX, Lush has seen firsthand how equipping human agents with AI enables them to respond to any customer, anywhere—scaling support from the in-person experience at a local shop to a global, round-the-clock operation.

That support is affectionately known as Marvin, a custom AI agent. Marvin resolves their most repetitive queries—”saving our agents from sending the same macro 400 times a day”—including sales and discounts, donations, order dissatisfaction, and discontinued products. Marvin can also request customer information upfront and add tags and labels to incoming tickets, giving agents the context they need to solve issues faster.

The results? With Marvin taking care of common customer questions, the team reached a 60% first contact resolution (FCR) rate. This saves Lush about five minutes per ticket, or about 360 agent hours each month. With that time saved, human agents can dedicate more energy to meaningful customer interactions.

Building on Marvin’s success, Lush is now trialing AI copilot to help their human agents do their jobs better. But they’re leaning on said agents to explore what that means exactly.

“We’ve involved frontline staff from different countries to test the experience, because they’re ones who will be using the copilot everyday,” shared Naomi. “Their feedback is valuable to us, and will inform how we proceed.”

2. Keep customers at the heart of every interaction

While their ability to measure customer experience has evolved, not everything at Lush has changed, especially their customer-centric approach. They accomplish this by maintaining the feel of an in-person shop experience—working smarter using Zendesk, while still providing that personal touch to customers.

“Our customers have grown up from seeing us on the local street and getting to know our staff,” shared Naomi. “While we’re now a global business with hundreds of shops and hopefully millions of customers, we want to perpetuate that feeling that we’re your friends, and if you come to us we have the time to listen to you, have a friendly chat, but also find a resolution.”

At Lush, customer sentiment and SLA’s go hand in hand—and agents are trained to value both. They use Zendesk to power all of their customer support channels, as well as to monitor and analyze customer inquiries.

“Always listen to your customer care team, because they’ve heard every question—and they know how happy your customers are,” said Naomi. “But also pay attention to how happy your team is. Make sure they have the right tools. If you give people the tools, the respect, and the autonomy to solve things in a good and kind way, they’ll feel happy and satisfied in their job—and in turn, you’ll have happy customers. That’s what’s worked for us.”

3. Leverage CX insights to meet customer needs

After 30 years in business, Lush knows that cultural nuances play into customer sentiment. Zendesk helps Lush identify customer insights to determine which products they should market today, as well as to anticipate and respond to evolving market trends. Adding bespoke tags and ticket fields, alongside out-of-the-box functions, helps Lush classify the nature of every customer interaction.

“One of our limited-edition products, called “Sticky Dates,” went viral because it was used on Love Island—and we just couldn’t make it fast enough. People were mad for it. Thankfully, we were able to react quickly because we could immediately see all these tickets were mentioning this product, so we knew something was happening.”

Naomi shared that, unfortunately, not all products go viral for a good reason.

“Lush has made henna for 30 years. Something we heard from our customers was that it was too difficult to break down into a paste to use on your hair. So our founder created and launched a new formulation,” said Naomi. “But within a week of it going on sale, we started to receive negative feedback from customers on every continent. After three weeks, there were nearly 300 customers who wrote in to tell us they were not happy with the product. We pulled that product from stores immediately, and went back to the drawing board. After another careful reformulation, we actually sent the new product to the customers who’d shared their feedback with us so they could test it first. And that version—the one reformulated at our customers’ request—is the one you can now buy.”

Armed with AI-powered insights and efficiencies, Lush stays ahead of customer expectations and the competition—delivering products that customers love and personalized service they can’t get anywhere else.