MeUndies transforms performance management and delivers better customer experiences with Pathlight

“Pathlight gave our agents the opportunity to have more initiative in terms of hitting their goals. In the past it was all dependent on the team lead for setting those goals— now they’re more involved in making their action items. With Pathlight they can be proactive about what they want to get better at and do next month.” — Lorraine Grace Lopez, Senior Account Manager at MeUndies

Pathlight Impact: MeUndies’ Customer Support department chose Pathlight to transform its performance management process. MeUndies needed a platform powerful enough to solve multiple growth-related CX problems that prevented them from delivering world-renowned first-class customer service. Pathlight reduced employee workload by 4+ hours per week by delivering real-time performance data to the entire organization, and granting leadership visibility into coaching across the frontline.

Location: Headquartered in Los Angeles, California

Company Size: 117 employees and growing

Annual Revenue: $75M (2019)

Established in 2011, MeUndies is a popular Los Angeles-based clothing brand specializing in ultra-soft underwear, loungewear, and sleepwear. Well-known for pioneering a monthly underwear subscription featuring fun, unique prints, MeUndies continues to innovate at the frontline of the subscription industry. MeUndies’s fiercely loyal customer base relies on their renowned Customer Support team, the CheekSquad, whenever they need help. Whether it’s a question about order status, sizing, washing, product releases, or if their underwear is vegan— the CheekSquad is on it.

It is no secret MeUndies’ strong customer loyalty is largely due to the remarkable customer experience the CheekSquad provides. However, as it grew, the CX department’s ability to deliver top-tier customer service was inhibited due to these factors:

• Nobody in the organization had access to consolidated, real-time performance data— leaving team leads and agents alike operating on stale, unreliable data
  
• Customer support team leads were bogged down with painstaking manual data work, sacrificing hours of their time each week trying to piece together the puzzle of agent and team performance instead of focusing on coaching and driving results
  
• Agents were entirely reliable on busy team leads to understand where they stood on key metrics and goals, hampering their ability to self-manage their performance
  
• Org leadership had zero visibility into the coaching taking place between team leads and agents, making it unclear whether the frontline was operating at their high standards of success

Pathlight put an end to the mystery surrounding agent and team performance. With Pathlight, MeUndies’ customer support team enjoys org-wide visibility into real-time performance, streamlined data analysis, and insight into the frequency and efficacy of critical communication and coaching. In embracing Pathlight as their single source of truth, MeUndies eliminated the guessing game for good and guaranteed the success of their customer support team at scale.

“Information lived in so many different places. We were exporting all of the data from different platforms and using a lot of Google Sheets to look at it. Not only was it so much manual work, but also a lot of repeat work. Many of us were doing the same work to get base level answers to the question— “How is our team doing?” — Caylen McDonald, Customer Experience Manager at MeUndies

Get Answers Faster by Eliminating Spreadsheets and Reports

MeUndies’ Customer Support team leads lacked a source of truth for performance, leaving them drowning in manual work to compile data from Zendesk, Maestro, Stella, and Lessonly into complex spreadsheets. Team leads reported spending eight hours per week extracting, organizing, and analyzing their teams’ data just to provide agents with a glimpse of their individual standing. Agents reported that by the time they received their numbers from the team lead, they would be stale, leaving them with no reliable understanding of their performance.

“Before [Pathlight] we had to ask our team leads for updates on our scores and team average in order to compare them. It was really time consuming for us to check how we were doing.” — Grace Tamboco, Customer Support Agent at MeUndies

After adopting Pathlight, MeUndies found time-saving benefits across the entire organization. Pathlight’s automated data consolidation relieved team leads from manual data work. Lorraine Grace Lopez, Senior Account Manager at MeUndies, said “Having all of our data in Pathlight really saves team leads time when it comes to coaching team members. In the past they had to spend so much ‘heads down time’ pulling and analyzing data— now they don’t need to.” MeUndies’ Customer Experience Manager, Caylen McDonald said, “Pathlight cut prep time for 1-on-1s in half.” On average, Pathlight saved each MeUndies team lead 4+ hours per week. With the recovered time and better performance data, team leads delivered more effective and targeted coaching.

Agents also saved time; they no longer had to reach out to their team leads in order to understand their own performance. With Pathlight, frontline agents could see— in just one click— how they were doing in real-time and use that information to identify and act on opportunities for improvement. Grace, a MeUndies customer support agent, checks her performance in Pathlight at the start of every shift.

"Pathlight helps me create goals for myself. I can set goals like '900 tickets by the end of the month' and I am reminded of the goal I need to achieve every day. When I see my score in real-time, and it’s positive, it keeps me motivated. If my score is failing, I’ll feel motivated to do my best to keep my target,” Grace said. Caylen McDonald notes, “The best part about Pathlight is the autonomy and responsibility it puts on the agents.” Pathlight saves hours across the entire customer support org and creates more time for employees to focus on improving their ability to serve customers.

“Pathlight is one of the first apps I pull up when I start my shift. It’s like a status update to check my performance and find the things I need to improve on. I can see the real-time updates for all of our metrics scores, so there’s no need for me to go to other apps or ask my team lead.” — Grace Tamboco, Customer Support Agent at MeUndies

Creating Visibility and Accountability Around Coaching

MeUndies leadership lacked visibility into frontline coaching and struggled to discern what conversations were happening between team leads and agents. The customer support org’s remote nature meant MeUndies CX leaders were limited in their ability to understand and influence 1-on-1s. It was unclear if issues were being documented, discussed, or improved over time. The absence of visibility into coaching prevented leadership from seeing which agents needed extra support and training.

The seasonal nature of their business exacerbated this problem during the holidays when dozens of new hires were ramping up fast. MeUndies leadership was unable to gain insight into critical 1-on-1s during their busiest time of year. Lorraine Grace Lopez said, “I don’t have agent 1-on-1s anymore, I only have direct reports. If team leads don’t tell me about things they feel aren’t as important, I don’t know about them.”

“Our whole team is remote so one of my biggest challenges is having visibility. Looking into metrics is one thing— but having visibility into how team leads are coaching their agents and how 1-on-1s are going— is another. Not having that visibility is hard because I don't get all the details.” — Caylen McDonald, Customer Experience Manager at MeUndies

Pathlight delivered crucial visibility and accountability to the CX org by providing leadership with insight into 1-on-1s. With Pathlight, leadership could dig into any 1-on-1 to see what topics were being covered, what feedback was provided, and review agents’ assigned tasks and mini goals. Leaders had access to the full picture— the individual development of agents and how team leads were managing. Now they could ask questions, offer input, and direct agents’ growth.

Lorraine Grace Lopez said, “[1-on-1s] are the best part of Pathlight— I can see what's being shared between agents and team leads. I can browse and bring something up in my 1-on-1 with the team lead and ask why it wasn't brought to my attention.” Pathlight created accountability from MeUndies leadership all the way down to the frontline, allowing them to focus on driving results instead of playing a guessing game surrounding coaching.

“It’s been great to have that increased visibility into coaching and 1-on-1s. Those are intangibles that I can't know unless I have someone directly telling me what they are. Getting real insight into those agenda items has been super helpful.” — Caylen McDonald, Customer Experience Manager at MeUndies

Clearing Obstacles to Focus on Exceptional Customer Experiences

Before Pathlight, team leads and agents alike were hindered by MeUndies’ former process of gathering performance data. Team leads were drowning in spreadsheets while agents were struggling with lack of real-time visibility. At the top of the organization, CX leaders were forced to rely on the team leads to communicate with them about 1-on-1s and agent coaching.

With Pathlight MeUndies was able to:

• Reshape their process of understanding agent and team performance in real time
  
• Rescue team leads from hours of time-sucking manual data work by automating and consolidating performance data
  
• Grant agents autonomy in managing their own performance
  
• Eradicate the mystery around coaching taking place on the frontline

Pathlight transformed how MeUndies’ customer support team operates by becoming their single source of truth for performance. Team leads and agents were empowered to do their best work while leadership gained visibility into the process that makes MeUndies’ customer experience reputation industry-leading.