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What do you get when you cross formal architecture training with the ancient Vietnamese paper art of kirigami? For Lovepop founders John Wise and Wombi Rose, you get a fantastic business idea. The pair married their experience at the Webb Academy training to be naval architects with what they learned on a Harvard school trip to Vietnam to create Lovepop, which makes beautiful, unique 3D paper products that are laser-cut and hand-assembled. The sliceform structure from ship design is one of the most robust methods of construction, and when turned into paper art forms, it’s also one of the most beautiful. Their “slicegami” can be found online and in various retail stores throughout the United States.
After the brand’s turn on the television show Shark Tank, they experienced high growth that necessitated them to think about how they handled support.
Even before Shark Tank, Lovepop had attempted to establish an in-house customer support team. They’d tried various tactics, including looping in their retail and HQ teams to participate in all hands support. Unfortunately, there were scheduling, communication, and consistency issues. The team couldn’t offer regular hours, especially with the entire team on the east coast.
Bhav Raju, Senior Manager of Customer Happiness Operations, recalls, “Ultimately, when we were on Shark Tank, we heard ‘you are going to need a large customer support team. Once Shark Tank airs, you’re going to hear from customers—a lot of them.’ We needed something that was going to scale as we grew.” They first debated whether to keep the team in-house, ultimately deciding that managing payroll for a full-time team would be a lot to handle. They started evaluating BPOs and chose PartnerHero because of cultural alignment. “The PartnerHero culture and leadership stood out. We knew our customers would be taken care of by this team,” Bhav says.
Lovepop’s partnership with PartnerHero became more valuable as the company grew. It was more than just making it easier to manage payroll for a global team, says Bhav. “PartnerHero ran the recruiting, the training, and owned the whole onboarding experience,” she says. “When you try to do that in-house, it takes tremendous manpower.”
PartnerHero began the relationship by building an entire US team. Then, Lovepop transitioned to a mainly Honduras-based team and ultimately moved operations to the Philippines. They experienced such success using PartnerHero for customer support that they brought on teams to support wholesale, B2B, and their finance team.
PartnerHero has enabled Lovepop to meet its growing customer support demand and improve its overall service quality
“Over the past couple of years,” Bhav says, “we’ve been able to refine our metrics and SLAs. We know our team is great, but when there are metrics, there’s an overall heightened understanding of the work.”
PartnerHero has worked alongside Lovepop to understand better what the team is doing and where they can improve. The feedback exchanged between the two groups has helped the Happiness Operations team make a real and lasting impact on their customer experience strategy. For instance, Bhav says, “PartnerHero introduced us to the idea of a knowledge base. We worked towards building it, which ended up being a great resource for our customers and internal agents. It totally reduced our contact rate. PartnerHero brings so much more to the table than just staffing.”
PartnerHero has also helped level up the education of the people on Lovepop’s internal team. Bhav initially joined customer support out of necessity during the pandemic. Lovepop’s retail stores, which she had been managing, had temporarily closed due to lockdown precautions, and she worked directly with PartnerHero’s program managers to learn about the things she’d need to succeed in her new role. “Over the past few years, bringing my knowledge into this realm of customer support and having the PartnerHero team be there as a resource for me and collaborating has helped me build such a strong foundation. They’ve always been phenomenal about teaching me the ropes.” Of course, day-to-day operations are just as vital as planning strategies for the future. Given how seasonal the greeting card industry is, it’s essential to be flexible. PartnerHero helps Lovepop keep their team up and running even with the extreme spikes in volume, depending on the time of year.
“It’s more than just a BPO to us,” Bhav says. “They own the entire onboarding process and have allowed us to scale our business needs. They understand our culture, which enables us to level up the service and support we can provide our customers.”
