Butternut Box

The Situation

Butternut Box has undergone rapid  growth in the six years since its founding, expanding from the UK into Ireland, and, most recently, setting up shop in the Netherlands, with plans to continue expanding  throughout Europe.

Butternut Box has always been customer-obsessed, and, early on, the Customer Love team was recognized internally as a key driver of customer retention and advocacy. However, managers were aware that they were not fully leveraging the potential of this team, which could pose a significant risk to future growth.

The Customer Love team was attempting to build relationships with customers by personalizing interactions and connecting with pet parents in a way that fostered trust, yet, as the team—and Butternut Box’s popularity—grew, they were seeking more modern ways to engage with customers, and they knew they needed a partner, rather than just a provider, to help them do this.

They understood that customers’ needs were changing faster than ever and wanted a customer service platform that was flexible enough to meet these changing needs. In addition to this, Butternut Box knew they would need to provide multi-language support as they continued their growth journey and their current software provider was only able to provide limited and clunky solutions.

The Challenge

Butternut Box was struggling to empower its Customer Love team to create personalized experiences at scale, but the team was lacking access to customer information and a unified view of customer service journeys.

Internally, the Customer Love team was recognized as a key contributor to growth, but they needed to find a way to scale the personalized experiences that helped them find success in the first place. 

Unfortunately, there was a misalignment between brand ambitions and their current technology. Their legacy ticketing system focused only on efficiency at the cost of personalization and true connection, and the team lacked the insight and context to provide conversational experiences.

In order to live up to their brand promise, leaders needed a way to empower their team to create amazing experiences while balancing the need to be available to all customers, and they knew they needed a partner, not just a provider, to do this.

Missing context

Without easy access to one source of truth for important internal knowledge and customer data, the Customer Love team needed to spend precious time searching through various systems and internal folders to find the information they needed.

Lack of data

The legacy ticketing tool was frustrating to use and prevented the Customer Love team from making data-backed decisions that cemented customer loyalty and led to advocacy (sending a surprise chew toy, sharing a discount code, or even sending a bouquet of condolence flowers).

Inability to make changes without IT

The team couldn’t make changes to their routing and channels without the help of a third-party provider. This resulted in long wait times for simple adjustments and clunky workarounds that frustrated team members and prevented them from making the improvements they wanted.

The Solution

Butternut Box partnered with Dixa to empower employees to create personalized experiences at scale and connect with customers in a meaningful way, building customer loyalty even as the company expands into new markets. They’ve achieved outstanding results by utilizing these key Dixa capabilities:

• Conversational context: Access to customer data and past interactions allows the team to add a personal touch to every interaction – at scale
• Intelligent routing: ensures that customers are connected with the agent best suited to their problem 
• No-code channel builder: ease of rolling new channels lets the team be quick and responsive in new territories
• Analytics: helps the team make data-backed business decisions that help with growth
• Integrated knowledge base: offers contextual knowledge prompts and saves team members time

Conversational context allows the team to provide personalized experiences at scale

Dixa displays each customer interaction—regardless of the channel—as one conversation, showing key customer information, like contact history, all in a single screen. The Customer Love team uses this data to build more personalized experiences, even as the company grows and contact volume increases. This has reduced overall handling time and  improved the working experience for team members, motivating them by making their day-to-day easier and more enjoyable. 

Team members are empowered to create surprises for customers – sending them gifts based on customizable data, such as a pet’s birthday, which can be seen in previous conversations using the chronological side bar that details customer history. In keeping with their culture of customer love, employees are free to choose what they send to customers, with no budget restrictions. For example, one Customer Love team member noticed that one of their furry customers had just gotten a little brother. To help welcome him into the pack, they sent along a toy for the brothers to enjoy together!

Intelligent routing ensures that customers are connected with the right agent 

Butternut Box has always had a customer-centric culture, and, with Dixa, the Customer Love team can now leverage data-driven prioritization to ensure every question gets to the right team member at the right time (based on business intelligence like customer importance, country, or risk of churn) and no customer goes unanswered. 

An impactful use case has been “first timers” – when a customer contacts Butternut Box for the first time, they are recognized and prioritized to ensure that they are sent to Customer Love team members who are experts at helping new customers, ensuring that they begin building the right type of relationship from the very beginning. Butternut Box knows the importance of this first interaction, as this is likely the first time they’ve ever interacted with anyone from the company. And it pays off: new customers who sign up after speaking with a team member have retention rates around 7% higher than the average customer coming through on other channels because of the quick responses and additional support. 

The team also uses intelligent routing to reduce their customer churn rate. They’ve set up an urgent queue, which automatically prioritizes inquiries where a customer has used keywords like “important,” or “urgent,” that signal a potentially high-stakes interaction. These customers are then fast-tracked and receive assistance from the Customer Love team’s most knowledgeable and empathetic members as quickly as possible. 

In addition to this, the team is leveraging the “follow-up” feature to make sure that no customer gets lost in a black box. When resolution will take more than one interaction, such as the Customer Love team needing to wait for an update from a shipping partner, the team member sets a time-based reminder, automatically putting this customer back into their queue and prioritizing the follow up outreach. Making it even more helpful, if that team member should need to sign out before getting an answer back to the customer (let’s say their child gets sick and needs to be picked up at school), the conversation is sent back into the queue, with top prioritization, and routed to the next-best team member. This new team member is then given all the necessary context to provide a truly personalized experience.

No-code channel builder lets the team be quick and responsive in new territories 

In a high-growth environment, it’s important for the Customer Love team to be agile and have the ability to make changes to channels and flows themselves, without outside help or IT. With Dixa’s simple channel set-up, the team is able to support the company’s immediate needs for multi-language customer service in new regions across live chat, email, social media,  site forms, calls, and WhatsApp, all without any outside help. 

Using Dixa’s channel analytics, Butternut Box could see that, in the UK, WhatsApp was used primarily for delivery issues and operational challenges. So, as they geared up for their Netherlands launch, they knew that WhatsApp would be an important channel to have up-and-running from day one. The Customer Love team was then able to make small tweaks as and when needed, without the help of IT or the Dixa team.

Integrated knowledge base offers contextual knowledge prompts

With Dixa’s intelligent knowledge base, the Customer Love team has access to all the knowledge they need, right at their fingertips. They can provide customers with expert guidance on the best food for their dog, and a more knowledgeable team can now make courtesy calls, providing pet parents with expert nutritional and lifestyle advice. And with automatic knowledge prompts, team members are served the knowledge they need, when they need it, making for shorter handling times and faster responses. 

Plus, new team members gain access to automatic knowledge prompts and a centralized bank of knowledge that allows them to get up-to-speed faster, and removes the burden of training from the existing team. New representatives are routinely onboarded in under two weeks, shaving off precious time-to-market for the growing startup. 

Using analytics & quality assurance to help the business make data-backed decisions

Using Dixa’s powerful analytics, the Customer Love team has gained key insight into each customer segment, and, as a result, provided strategic data to the rest of the business. A main impact of this has been their acquisition strategy, where the team’s insights impacted which potential customers the business focused on, ensuring they were targeting the most profitable segments.

And with Dixa’s tagging functionality, the team can also pull data for nearly any question someone in the business may have, always being sure to add extra value to each query – either doing a data deep-dive, or providing ongoing insight into a particular query.

In addition to this, the team uses the Stella Connect integration to learn which conversations foster customer advocacy and which signal an intention to churn. Team members are able to work together to then take immediate action and “really turn sub-par interactions around,” proactively reducing churn for the brand.