Lush Cosmetics
The UK’s No. 1-Ranked Beauty Brand Is Improving Customer Care—and Saving Money—with RingCentral
£20,000
annual savings since migrating all of the company’s telephony to RingCentral
3 hours
saved per agent per week using RingCentral's ZenDesk integration
10%
increase in customer satisfaction since adopting RingCentral
The feedback from our team for RingCentral has already been hugely positive. There’s a sense of relief that we’ve now moved from the clunkiness of an on-premise system to a next-generation cloud communications solution. Updates that used to take us hours to complete previously can now be done in a matter of minutes with RingCentral.
Brad Candy
Technical Operations Manager
Making consumers around the world more gorgeous for decades
Lush Cosmetics is on a short list of beauty-product companies whose innovations have truly changed the industry. In its 25-year history, Lush has introduced such game-changing products as fizzing bath bombs, shower jellies, and solid shampoo bars—all now copied by beauty brands around the world.
What makes Lush’s substantial catalogue of innovations even more impressive is that unlike most of its competitors, Lush conducts all R&D without animal testing or the use of any ingredients or processes that leave the environment worse than the company found it.
These impressive traits help explain why Lush has grown to become such a wildly popular beauty brand—now serving millions of customers each year at more than 950 retail stores around the world, including 100 in the UK alone. The Global Cosmetify Index has even ranked Lush the UK’s No. 1 most popular beauty brand, and No. 5 in the world.
This global organisation needed more than local, on-prem phone systems
Brad Candy, Lush’s Technical Operations Manager, explains that the global company’s legacy phone infrastructure posed two challenges—one immediate, the other long-term.
“To consistently provide our customers an excellent experience, our Customer Care department needs reliable and easy-to-manage telephony. Our old phone system delivered neither. We had reliability issues, with the system often shutting down or refusing to let agents log in remotely through the VPN. And it had an extremely complicated backend admin system, meaning we needed vendor support anytime we had a problem or wanted to make a change.”
As for the longer-term challenge, Brad notes, Lush is a global organisation, continually expanding into new regions. With the company’s legacy phone infrastructure, each new location would have meant another on-prem phone system, which Brad’s IT team could neither integrate into a global company network nor manage easily from the UK.
Turning to trusted technology partner CDW
For help vetting technology options and vendors, Lush often turns to its longtime solution partner, CDW, to speed the process and find the solution that best meets the company’s needs. “We lean heavily on our partners at CDW,” says Brad. “They understand us and our requirements, and they guide us to solutions that fit our business. In the case of finding a more modern cloud telephony platform, CDW came through brilliantly by bringing us to RingCentral.”
CDW worked as a trusted partner, assisting with capturing Lush’s requirements, providing market insights around partner differentiation, and accelerating the evaluation process. RingEX is the industry-leading solution for cloud unified communications and is best positioned to empower Lush’s employees to deliver the best possible service to their customers and do what they do best – create innovative and ethical products.
Gavin Berwitz
Commercial Sales Director at CDW
INDUSTRY
Retail
HQ
Poole,
United Kingdom
YEAR FOUNDED
1995
EMPLOYEES
11,000+
At Lush, our Customer Care team leverages the Zendesk Talk Partner Edition for RingEX to seamlessly handle calls and create tickets concurrently. This integration has been a game-changer for our efficiency, saving us an impressive three to five minutes per call. When you consider the volume of calls we handle, this translates to about 40 minutes saved per agent each day. This significant boost in productivity allows our team to redirect their focus to other critical tasks, enhancing our overall efficiency as a business unit and upleveling our customer care operations, aligning perfectly with Lush's commitment to exceptional, personalised service.
Jason Bruno
Technical Operations Engineer
RingCentral adds flexibility, efficiency, and business intelligence
As Brad explains, Lush’s Customer Care department found numerous ways to improve its operations using RingCentral’s anywhere, any-device cloud phone system.
“Onboarding new people became easier than ever with RingCentral,” he explains. “Our previous system required a lot of training for new agents, and even then, they’d often have challenges. With RingCentral, onboarding is as easy as sending a new-hire a couple of links to short video tutorials in RingCentral University. Then they can sign on by themselves and start using it.”
The team also uses RingCentral’s detailed reporting, Brad explains, to manage the Customer Care team’s performance and ensure the department keeps all call queues staffed appropriately. “RingCentral’s reports are so clear and easy to use, which makes it easy for our Customer Care Managers to monitor call volumes and make sure we’re adequately staffed for peak times. Those reporting tools definitely help us provide a better customer experience.”
In addition, Jason Bruno, Technical Operations Engineer, highlights the benefit of using the Zendesk integration as another way RingCentral has enhanced their customer experience. Jason also praises RingCentral's support: "I have used the support resources in the past and every single time I've had to call them, they've offered superb support there and if they need more time to fix, they're usually fixed the same day or in a reasonable length of time."
In several ways, Brad adds, RingCentral also provides more flexibility than Lush’s team has ever had. “RingCentral lets our staff work just as productively at home as in the office. We never had reliable remote-work capability with the old phone setup. Also, it’s so easy with RingCentral to quickly add extra licences for short-term staff around the holidays—and turn them off when the season ends. That lets us operate more efficiently and manage our costs.”
Jason emphasises another aspect of RingCentral's flexibility: "The stand out feature for me is probably call flip, it's fantastic. Not many VOIP providers offer this." This capability allows employees to seamlessly transfer calls between devices, further enhancing their ability to work efficiently from any location.
We've had more than a 10% increase in customer satisfaction since joining RingCentral, our previous VOIP platform was slow and constantly had issues with connectivity. Moving to a Cloud VOIP over our previous platform has helped significantly with cost and lower complexities of configuration too.
Jason Bruno
Technical Operations Manager
Reducing telecom expenses
Speaking of costs, Brad also points out that although the migration to RingCentral was not primarily about saving money, the company discovered that transitioning away from its legacy phone infrastructure resulted in ongoing cost savings.
When we rolled RingCentral to our UK headquarters, we were able to eliminate our old telecom services and hardware-maintenance contracts. That let us bring our phone costs down by £20,000 a year.
Brad Candy
Technical Operations Manager
Improving the customer experience even more with a refund-app integration
Finally, Brad points out, the Customer Care team found an ingenious way to add even more value to its telephony operation—using RingCentral’s API platform to integrate a self-serve payment-refund service by phone.
“Our automated phone menu gives an option to customers who want a refund on a purchase. They can enter their credit card details, and the RingCentral system hands those numbers off to our refund app. If everything matches up with the purchase, the system automatically processes the refund. That’s a great service we can now offer to customers, and because it’s entirely self-serve, it frees up our agents to handle other customer inquiries.”
Thanks to RingCentral, we now have a scalable system which, as a rapidly growing company, suits us perfectly. When we’re expanding into our other locations across Europe, setting up telephony for that staff is just going to be a case of: How many would you like? When would you like it? Let’s turn it on.
Brad Candy
Technical Operations Manager
Exploring AI within RingCentral
As Lush continues to explore the full potential of RingCentral's capabilities, Jason concludes with an eye toward the future: "I hope that we can use more features in RingCentral moving forward as there are plenty of app integrations we could lean on." He also expresses curiosity about emerging technologies, particularly AI. "I would be very interested to hear how this can be used for our use," Jason adds, highlighting Lush's openness to leveraging AI-driven solutions to further enhance their customer service and operational efficiency.