Today’s interview is with Naomi Rankin, the Manager of Global Customer Care at Lush, the British cosmetics retailer. I spoke to Naomi when I attended Zendesk’s recent Relate event, which took place in Las Vegas on March 25th-27th. We talk about her highlights from the event, what customer care means to Lush, their approach to AI and her journey with Lush from starting work in one of their shops to now managing the global customer care team that covers 24 markets, 15 different languages, and another 20 partner markets.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Omnichannel was a myth – Interview with Gaurav Passi of Zingly – and is number 541 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Naomi:

• Naomi’s background prior to Lush was in the health service and did a lot face-to-face work with patients.
• Lush has a strong culture of being environmentally humane and animal-friendly, and everything they do, from products to staff and technology, has to reflect those values.
• Their ethos also influences how they treat customers, and they aim to make customers feel like friends and family.
• Naomi started on the shop floor and worked her way up to being the Manager of Global Customer Care.
• Their newly appointed CTO started at the same time as Naomi, learned coding and tech, etc and is now the CTO.
• Their shop floor staff can take a sabbatical and come and work in customer care for three months, say.
• When COVID happened, we all had to go remote, but customer care wasn’t allowed to be furloughed because we had to keep going as the digital business was growing.
• That forced us to both recruit and redeploy staff from all over the UK.
• The redeployed staff, however, had this amazing product knowledge and had experience dealing with customers so once they had learned how to use Zendesk we get them on chat within a couple of days.
• Now, before each seasonal period we try and hire internally because there’ll always be someone either who’s part-time in the shop and wants to supplement their hours, or maybe there is someone else who just wants a change of role.
• Since COVID, we’re now encouraging every member of our support teams to do at least one day a year on the shop floor. That includes developers, which is quite a culture shock for many of them.
• Our journey with gathering data about the nature of customer queries started very simply but now we track around 3,000 issues covering our whole catalogues of products, discounts and customer issues.
• We gather that data via a globally agreed form that we ask customers to complete when they contact us.
• We worry about every customer taht has a bad experience and use their stories to connect people to the problems.
• We use the Ultimate (now Zendesk) ticket bot. He’s called Marvin, after the chararcter in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
• We first introduced Marvin about three or four years ago, and the test of how useful he would be was to deploy him before Black Friday with the macro and the explanation of why we as a company don’t take part in Black Friday.
• It was so successful in the first week that he did 57% of all our contacts, and that was the week before Black Friday.
• After some initial reservations from some of the care team about Marvin, another great thing that Marvin now does it when someone emails in with, “I want to return this or I need a refund,” that kind of query, Marvin would go straight back with, “That’s great, we’ll do that, but we need an image of the damage, and your proof of purchase, and your order number if you’ve got it, or the shop you bought it in if it wasn’t online.”
• Those are the questions usually the agents would have to ask and it would take three or four emails to get the job done, but now they’re coming into the email, and all the information’s there, so now they can just solve it in one go.
• Trevor Noah: “Change is great. But, changing is a tumultuous and terrible sort of thing.”
• Our position with staff re the use of automation and AI is this: I can’t replace your brain. And I might be able to train AI with all the stuff you know, but it can’t love or show empathy or laugh. And that’s what I need you to do with our customers, because a customer might come in and have had a really bad day. And so going through an algorithm or having a chat isn’t going to feel the same as someone just listening to you on the phone and then going, “Do you know what? I’ll send you a random act. Just go and have a bath and you’ll be all right.”
• That’s what happened to me. That’s how I ended up at Lush.
• We really want our teams to have the time to listen to people and talk to them and have conversations and that’s where the technology can help you out. Not to replace them but to take all of the gumf out of the way so you’ve got the time to do that.
• We are being very careful with the use of AI because it needs to align with the brand.
• We’re in the middle of writing our policy about AI, and it’s not finished yet because it’s such a huge subject and we don’t know all the answers yet. But we know that we can’t get completely away from it, but also if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it properly and at our own pace rather than just taking something box fresh and plugging it in because it’s convenient.
• I really get excited about digital security and data. So, Zendesk’s announcements about monitoring the thought process of the AI is very exciting.
• Also I love the new dashboards so I’m really looking forward to playing more with them
• And, finally when you’re in 24 markets and across 15 different languages, and you’ve got another 20 partner markets, then Zendesk’s new knowledge builder product is going to be absolutely monumental for us.

About Naomi

Naomi Rankin has worked for Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics since 2011 and with the Customer Care teams since 2015. She has been Manager of Global Customer Care since 2022. Together with her co-manager, Sonya Fanson, Naomi leads 19 international teams covering 24 countries and supporting customers in 15 languages. Naomi’s expertise lies in tech and systems knowledge, focusing on gathering and utilising data to create effective reports to shape business decisions. Naomi firmly believes that tech should be used for good, as a tool for humans to work smarter and easier, and to enable genuine human interactions.

Check out Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, the latest developments at Zendesk and feel free to connect with Naomi on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Trung Do Bao on Unsplash