How ticket automation helped Lush reach a 60% first contact resolution rate

Global handmade cosmetics brand Lush was hesitant about automating their support — but needed to clear their inbox of FAQs and give agents more time to connect with customers. Here’s how they went from support automation skeptics to AI enthusiasts.
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A woman applying a Lush face mask to her cheeks.
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5 mins saved per ticket
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60% first contact resolution rate
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360 agent hours saved monthly
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93% CSAT score

Lush at a glance

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The customer

A global cosmetics brand offering fresh, handmade beauty products

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The market

HQ’ed in the UK, Lush has branches in 21 countries — and stores operate in additional regions under franchise

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The support team

170 agents provide support in 15 languages to Lush customers around the world

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The channels

Customer care is available 7 days a week via phone, SMS, and email

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The situation

Lush needed to scale their support to meet growing demand — without growing their customer service team

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The solution

Ultimate’s ticket automation solution and a seamless integration with their existing CRM: Zendesk

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“With the pandemic and now a global recession, we’re not in a position to make our Customer Care team bigger and bigger. So we needed to make agents’ jobs easier by taking away the repetitive questions.”

Naomi Rankin
Global Customer Care Manager, Lush

The Ultimate collab

Customer-centricity is at the heart of how Lush operates. That’s why they started out as support automation skeptics: “We’ve always resisted too much automation because we never wanted to replace personal interactions,” says Naomi. But once they saw the substantial effort ticket automation would save them — giving agents more time to engage in meaningful conversations with customers — the support team soon became AI enthusiasts.

It took just 16 days for Lush to go live with ticket automation, and on his first day Marvin (as the team named their bot) answered 37% of tickets. But Lush’s support department doesn’t measure success by traditional efficiency measures. Instead, they focus on what customers are saying. And in the week after launching, despite higher numbers of complaints over Black Friday and delivery disruption due to UK Royal Mail strikes, CSAT was at 93%.

Success in numbers

First contact resolution rate 60%
Minutes saved per ticket 5
CSAT score 93%
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Use case deep dive: freeing their inbox of FAQs

  • The support team in UK and Ireland was already using Zendesk macros (prepared responses) to answer FAQs, but agents were still swimming in repeat requests

  • Lush went live with 4 intents to cover their most repetitive queries: sales and discounts, donations, order dissatisfaction, and discontinued products

  • With Marvin taking care of common customer questions, the team reached a 60% first contact resolution (FCR) rate — giving agents more time to work on complex cases that require their skills

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Use case deep dive: scaling support without scaling the team

  • Lush’s support department was struggling to keep pace with rising volumes as the company continued to expand, but hiring additional agents wasn’t an option

  • As well as deflecting FAQs, Marvin can request customer information upfront and add tags and labels to incoming tickets, giving agents the context they need to solve issues faster

  • These efficiency gains save Lush roughly 5 minutes per ticket and 360 agent hours each month — savings that free up their support team to dedicate more energy to meaningful customer interactions
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“Our priority is giving each customer the time they deserve — not getting rid of them as fast as possible. Ultimate’s solution fits with that need.”

Naomi Rankin
Global Customer Care Manager, Lush

Why Lush loves our ticket solution

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Seamless Zendesk integration

Our ticket solution fits right inside Lush’s existing tech stack, so personalization isn’t lost with automation and there’s no risk of data silos

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Multilingual

For a global business like Lush, multilingual support is a must — luckily our industry-leading conversational AI can speak 109 languages

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Intelligent triage

Automatic ticket tagging and pre-filling makes agents’ jobs easier and removes the possibility of human error: meaning accurate data and reporting

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Easy to train and maintain

It took just 16 days for Lush to go live with ticket automation and the team can continually iterate to improve the bot’s performance

Next on their automation journey

Building on the success of their English-language bot, the team is aiming to launch ticket automation in German next. After that, Lush plans to localize their automated ticket support in other English-speaking regions such as Australia. Eventually, Naomi wants to have bot managers taking care of ticket automation in every region Lush operates in.

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