Quarterly Spotlight Award Winner: Everlane’s Customer Experience Lead, Michi Fried!

We are thrilled to announce that Michi Fried, Customer Experience Lead at Everlane, is the recipient of Pathlight’s Customer Spotlight Award this quarter! Each quarter, we select one customer that stands out for their incredible leadership, excellence, and their success in using Pathlight to gain alignment, agility, and empowerment— thus helping their teams and organization drive results and hit their goals.

Everlane is a modern, digitally native e-commerce company making a difference— they pride themselves on exceptional quality, ethical factories, and radical transparency to pricing and where their clothes are made. Everlane employees join the company because of its inspiring mission of radical transparency—and, according to Michi, they stay for the undeniably strong camaraderie of the team. She says the CX team in particular has built the kind of supportive, helpful community that she has never experienced elsewhere.

Michi Fried has been with Everlane for five years now. She is responsible for the training and development of all new customer support agents. One of her favorite aspects of the role is meeting every new hire when they come on board and being able to watch them grow. Michi says, “I have the lucky opportunity to see them flourish and progress over time.”

There is a lot to know about Everlane products, processes, and how to provide exceptional customer experiences— and with Michi’s leadership, the team delivers. When it comes to maintaining their high standards for customer service, performance management is the key. The Everlane team has a proprietary OMS system and everyone is remote, so communication and clear performance expectations have always been crucial components of success.

Alignment and Clarity Around Performance

Everlane adopted Pathlight in May of 2021 in order to improve communication and provide visibility into rep performance. Before Pathlight, Everlane used Looker as a data tracker and had dashboards to look up metrics, but it wasn’t very user-friendly for employees lacking a data background. Michi recalled the lack of agent-level visibility and the challenges that presented. For managers, reporting was a very manual process and agents were often confused on how to use the data to formulate strategies for improving performance.

Pathlight provided clarity on what was going well, and what wasn’t— gone were the days of hiding behind confusing dashboards. Michi says, “Pathlight gave everyone a lot more visibility into their own metrics, which is huge.” She leads her team with Pathlight by showing them where they’re expected to be and providing guidance on how to get there. Her team also relies on the communication tools in Pathlight to share announcements and stay in sync with changes that get implemented.

Agility and Managing at Scale

Each customer success manager has about ten people on their team during the regular season; and during the holiday crush, Everlane hires another 25-30% of seasonal support, and then managers have about 20 people to manage. Realtime information is critical in being agile to customer demand and managing at scale. Everlane’s CX managers need to ensure their agents are hitting their goals by completing the expected number of tickets per day, and they use Pathlight’s Mini Goals feature to help agents stay on track.

Things can get crazy-busy in e-commerce, and one tactic the Everlane support team has developed is “Power Hour” where they create contests to see who can get through the most tickets in an hour. Michi says, “We use Pathlight to monitor performance both inside and outside of power hour.” On average a rep gets through about five tickets an hour, but during power hour, they have seen reps getting through eight customer tickets per hour— a 60% increase! It’s clear Everlane CX knows the value of realtime data and how to use it to their advantage.

Empowerment and Recognizing Top Performers

The visibility provided by Pathlight has been a huge game-changer in empowering agents to manage their own workload against expectations. It has also shone a spotlight on agents that go above and beyond— even if they’re on the quieter side.

Everlane uses Slack for team communications and connection. Outgoing personalities energize the team in this kind of space and it’s natural for those personalities to become team favorites— but Michi says that in the past they had agents who weren’t as chatty and, as a result, weren’t getting all of the recognition that they deserve. And like any great manager, she was passionate about making sure those agents are acknowledged. “Just because someone isn’t the most talkative or the most outgoing, doesn’t mean they aren’t crushing it in their work,” she says. The visibility Pathlight delivers has highlighted agents who are top performers day in and day out. Michi adds that it’s been a great motivator, and that morale improves when all reps the visibility and recognition they have earned.

One quick way that leadership sees who is hitting their goals is by checking agents’ Health Scores. For Everlane’s Customer Support team, the score is determined by a combination of CSAT, Ticket Rate, and QA. With one score, managers can instantly see who is on track, where they need to focus their coaching efforts, and where they need to acknowledge great performance.

Looking Forward

Everlane has enjoyed the benefits of adopting Pathlight and Michi says the next feature they are excited to dive into is Pathlight’s new QA tool. Up until now they have been using Google Sheets for QA and have to manually pull all of the interactions agents are working on. “It takes a lot of time and doesn’t allow us to do QA as often as we’d like,” she says. Her team is excited to roll out QA so she can deliver realtime feedback and do what CX leads do best— strengthen her team’s skills and drive performance.

Congratulations again, Michi! The entire Pathlight team is proud to work with you, so impressed by the team you are building, and, of course, the amazing customer service at Everlane.

Do you know someone who should be our Next Spotlight Customer? Nominate them here.

Interested in learning more about Pathlight and starting a trial for your team? Schedule a demo and speak to one of our Account Executives today!