Executive Summary

LEVO turned to Ravience to help them grow their direct-to-consumer business and provide customer service outsourcing. Ravience helped LEVO grow 156% in the past 3 years. 

• Generated over $220K through chat in the first 5 months
• Reduced support costs by 40%
• Handled over 10,000+ chats and emails

About LEVO

LEVO is a high-growth consumer tech company with an innovative, home wellness appliance that’s app-enabled. Their patented technology is designed exclusively for infusing botanicals into oil and butter.

Challenges & Objectives  

Before working with Ravience, LEVO worked with a distributor from the fall of 2016 to the summer of 2019 when they decided to go direct-to-consumer through their own eCommerce website and Amazon.

In order to go DTC, they needed to unbundle their customer service operations from their distributor who included support at a premium mark-up, and according to Sarah Ingram, Head of Operations,

“We were getting bad reviews about our customer service before Ravience.”

LEVO’s premium appliance was a hit — kitchen connoisseurs, you’ll love it — but their customer experience didn’t match the elegance of their product. LEVO’s team knew they needed to uplift the customer experience to convert more customers, lower their support costs, and have it scale. 

After careful consideration, LEVO selected Ravience as their new customer service outsourcing provider because Ravience specialized in two things that would be vital to LEVO’s success:

• Conversions
• Complexity
  

LEVO was ramping up marketing efforts to drive traffic directly to its website and their previous support team had no expertise in using live chat to convert visitors into sales.

Secondly, LEVO knew its product was innovative and didn’t squarely fit into a box so customers would have questions to understand its complexities, how it worked with different use cases.

Ravience thrives in complex products and knows how to convert visitors.

Since LEVO’s 4/20 direct-to-consumer launch, Ravience has generated over $220,000 in revenue specifically attributed to chat and managed over 10,000 customer support interactions on chat, text, and email.

With a renewed interest in health, quality ingredients, and cooking at home, LEVO was able to tap into new customer bases and exceeded sales goals. They anticipate growth to continue, and by outsourcing customer service to Ravience (email support and live chat), they’re able to scale their customer service just as rapidly as they’ve scaled their company. 

How Ravience Transformed the Customer Experience

By building a knowledge base that allows customers to answer questions themselves, implementing a scalable live chat team, and providing email support services, Ravience has created an unstoppable, incredible customer support experience for LEVO.

“It was great,” Sarah said. “Ravience wasn’t cookie-cutter. Ravience customized to our needs. They were exactly what we needed.” 

As you’ll see in LEVO’s case, outsourcing your customer service is one of the best ways to maximize your resources and build an incredibly efficient team.

Outsourcing your customer support has an ROI you can’t ignore.

Related: Balancing Sales and Support via Customer Service

“Ravience wasn’t cookie-cutter. Ravience customized to our needs. They were exactly what we needed.”

Transitioning from the Previous Provider

The previous provider was their distributor and aside from offering high-level data on the volume of support requests handled each month, they did not provide any other data or knowledge.

Ravience was on its own to build a customer service department from scratch while transitioning from an existing provider.

The approach that Ravience took was to reverse-engineer all the existing processes to establish a baseline, re-engineer the processes to better, faster, and less expensive, and document the new processes for LEVO to also have access.

Related: How to Outsource Your eCommerce Site’s Customer Service

Creating Client-Specific Courses in a Learning Management System

Ravience then turned all the processes and standard operating procedures into an online course and put those courses into their learning management system so that new agents could be onboarded quickly — a key to scaling.

LEVO also had full visibility of the documentation so that nothing was secretive as it was before, and they had full control over how all the processes would be executed.

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Building a Self-Service Knowledge Base

Because LEVO already had customers to service and was adding a direct-to-consumer model via their website and Amazon, Ravience knew that designing scale into the initial solution was key.

Otherwise, LEVO would be in a situation where they might see a spike in orders and consequently, customer support, and continually have to add support staff.

“People can type their question and get an answer to our frequently asked questions. It’s saved us a lot of time, helped our transparent communication, and improved response times.” 

Ravience laid out a vision for building a public-facing knowledge base which would have three benefits:

1. Reduce the number of customer service tickets
2. Improve the buyer’s journey so they can make a purchasing decision
3. Increase website page rank since Google loves questions and answers

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Within weeks, Ravience had written over 100 articles with detailed instructions and custom images for LEVO’s self-service knowledge base.

Related: What’s a Self-Service Knowledge Base and Why Do You Need One?

Results

Increased Conversions

By implementing a completely new live chat strategy that was focused on providing customer support AND converting website traffic into sales, Ravience transformed LEVO’s sales permanently.

LEVO immediately saw a difference in every measure:

• Increased conversions
• Increased average order size
• Reduced cart abandonment rates
  

This was music to everyone’s ears — especially their CEO who loved the elevated customer experience that drove results, their COO who loved the fast, helpful, and accurate response times and total reduction in backlogs, and their CMO who loved the lower customer acquisition costs.

Related: Everything You Need to Know to Convert with Live Chat

Improved Customer Response Times

When LEVO began selling units, their distributor offered extra customer support services. In the beginning, it seemed like an obvious decision that was bound to work. 

Little did they know; their distributor was not an expert in customer service. In fact, quite the opposite.  

In Sarah’s words, “They definitely weren’t trained.”

“We would get complaints about long lead times, replacements, or warranties,” she said. Customers would wait anywhere from weeks to months to receive a new crucial part or returned service units.

Ravience changed all of that. 

Ravience’s live chat and email support agents are trained to respond on live chat within 40 seconds or less and on email within 2 hours. Besides speed, their knowledge-based training allows them to react with remarkable accuracy and organization. 

With a professional support team, Ravience helped LEVO, “shorten customer service processes and the time to get through the red tape,” Sarah said. 

Related: Millennials Literally Cannot Even With Your Customer Service. You Need Live Chat.

Increased Customer Satisfaction Ratings

Excellent customer service requires a human touch and consistent messaging across a company – something Sarah admits LEVO was missing. 

“We didn’t have specialized attention. There wasn’t a uniform voice. There were so many inconsistencies.”

This is why Ravience’s small team of specialized agents appealed to her.

Ravience tailors every agent response and email to your brand. We require agents to pass 4 exams with a 100% score before they go-live. Before you go live, our agents are run through a series of practice chats to provide another level of clarity. At that point, a Ravience customer support agent knows all the ins-and-outs of your products, services, processes, and systems.

“Our email and chat are a lot smoother than I could have imagined. It’s like having a support agent working right next to me,” Sarah said.

Related: 5 Ways to Create a Cohesive Customer Experience

Related: Get A Customer-Obsessed Reputation With Live Chat

Related: How to Run Test Chats Before Going Live

Lower Costs to Scale

LEVO is a beautiful, intuitive kitchen appliance that makes complicated processes a breeze in your home kitchen. Customers are intrigued but have questions.

As a result, they needed a streamlined, sharp, and specialized customer support team to manage the vast amount of questions, replacement issues, and warranty inquiries received. 

Ravience’s team of customer service agents was integral in improving their overall quality of support, but their growth during COVID posed another challenge: 

How would the team manage the massive increase in customer support needs while maintaining high customer satisfaction ratings? 

Rather than bring on a team member internally – which would eat up time and costs, LEVO trusted Ravience to keep up with the demand of their customers’ needs.

By creating a set of “trigger points” for LEVO to improve hiring expediency, Ravience is able to hire and train new customer support agents to go live within two weeks whenever they experience a burst in growth. 

This system allows the LEVO team to focus on other priorities, like marketing and product innovation. 

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Had LEVO tried to keep its customer service in-house, they would end up using resources that could be better utilized in areas like brand partnerships, product launches, or advertising. Outsourcing the hiring and managing of their customer support has allowed them to improve efficiency, increase their support load, and maintain high-quality service.

Since the switch to Ravience, LEVO has 95%+ ratings on every chat and email. Customers are leaving incredible reviews like,

“LEVO is the only website who has an actual live agent that responds instantly in my experience & having this as an option is PERFECT for LEVO! It’s an AWESOME feature that I DEF appreciate!”

“We’re benefiting from increased retention and higher conversions from customer questions. We are beaming and excited to grow with Ravience,” Sarah said.

After-Hours and Weekend Support

Having demonstrated an ROI that far exceeded LEVO’s expectations, Ravience proactively analyzed LEVO’s website traffic patterns and identified another opportunity: converting after-hours and weekend traffic and providing customer support.

As LEVO’s website traffic spanned till nearly midnight every day of the week, and backlogs would build up over the weekend, Ravience presented this data to LEVO and showed how expanding support would generate an even greater return on investment.

Within 2 weeks of LEVO’s approval, Ravience had added new agents to provide after-hours and weekend support who all had backups. The expanded hours have proven once again to increase sales and reduce support backlogs.

Hybrid AI-Chatbot + Human

In order to drive even more operational efficiencies, Ravience introduced a hybrid approach that combines that automation from an artificial intelligence chatbot with the ability for a human to live chat on high-value opportunities.

Many companies make the mistake of implementing a chatbot that is nothing more than an online form. Total fail.

Website visitors know this and immediately click the “x” when a chatbot pops up. When you have a complex product, you’ve lost an opportunity to convert a visitor and made a poor first impression with the chatbot.

Ravience’s approach is to use a hybrid model where a chatbot can handle transactional questions but when there’s a high-value opportunity, a live agent handles it in order to drive the conversion.

Related: When to Use a Chatbot vs. Human

Using Data to Support Supply Chain and Marketing Teams

LEVO also struggled to get customer data used for analysis and improvements from the previous company handling their customer service.

Sarah recalls their prior team interaction was, “like pulling teeth.”

“Since we didn’t have the reports and transcripts, we didn’t know where we had opportunities. We couldn’t make the content or supply-side adjustments to make our customer’s lives easier.”

Ravience knew exactly what customizations and configurations to establish so that LEVO would have the insights to track support performance and also get insights that they could relay to their supply chain and to their marketing team.

“There was an issue with our app we didn’t know about. If I weren’t able to get into the platform and see the tickets, it’d be hard to get it fixed fast,” Sarah explained.

Related: Improve Your Marketing ROI with These 4 Insights from Live Chat Transcripts

Related: 11 SMS Messaging Strategies: A Sales and Customer Support Guide

Now, whenever there are returns or warranty claims, LEVO’s supply chain is provided with exactly the information they need in order to pinpoint root cause analysis and solve the problems that lead to a better product.

Simultaneously, Ravience provides LEVO with persona insights and takes customer interactions, and translates that to content ideas that inform LEVO’s editorial calendar and other marketing campaigns such as SMS campaigns.

Ravience has turned LEVO’s customer service into a profit center.

LEVO Awarded #1 on Fast 50 List And Still Growing

We are proud to have helped LEVO grow 156% in the past 3 years. On Oct. 20, 2020, LEVO was named the #1 fastest growing company by the Denver Business Journal in their category. The holiday season in 2020 has been incredible for LEVO and we’ve helped them scale with seasonal resources. We can only imagine how 2021 will be!