MeUndies is no ordinary underwear and loungewear brand. They’re on a mission to fuel self-expression through their “softer-than-soft” products designed with comfort, body positivity and creativity in mind.

When MeUndies was founded in 2011, it was the first brand to offer an online underwear subscription. By the end of 2020, the brand had sold 16 million pairs of underwear. Between the brand’s Instagram shop, product tags, ads and rich influencer network, Instagram has long been, and continues to be, a fundamental part of that business growth. Such a robust social commerce strategy needs a customer care strategy to match.

When TK Lynch joined MeUndies as the Social Media Support Coordinator, he built a dedicated customer care strategy tailored for social. “Our philosophy is that if any problems come up for our customers, we want our brand to feel like a friend who’s on their side,” said Lynch. “We want to create an experience that doesn’t feel like you’re dealing with a customer service representative. Social allows us to create a customer experience that’s personable and casual, while still being effective.”

MeUndies’ customer care strategy encompasses social channels, but Instagram is where their customers most actively seek support, especially via Instagram Direct Messages (DMs). Until recently, Lynch and his team managed Instagram DMs and Story Replies natively, which created a host of issues. But now, with the help of Sprout Social’s Instagram messaging features, MeUndies’ team delivers customer care with greater efficiency, flexibility and accountability.

The need for speed

The Sprout Social Index™ Edition XVI: Above & Beyond found that 40% of consumers expect brands to respond within the first hour of reaching out on social media. TK initially had the same expectation for MeUndies. When he joined the team, the goal for the social customer care program was to respond within one hour for all message types, across all channels.

When the team handled Instagram messages natively, agents had to manually log responses and calculate response time in a Google Sheet, which was cumbersome. Now, Sprout’s Smart Inbox collects all inbound Instagram direct messages, mentions and comments in a single stream.

To say they’re crushing their initial one-hour to response goal would be an understatement. Between February 1 and March 31, 2021, alone, MeUndies received over 12,000 inbound Instagram messages, 24% of which were direct messages, and maintained an average first reply time of 19 minutes.

They no longer have to manually calculate those metrics either. “Having Instagram DMs in Sprout has really enhanced our customer support efforts. Our response metrics are all calculated within Sprout, which gives a clearer picture of how we are doing on Instagram and how that stacks up against our other social channels,” said Lynch.

Collaboration tools everyone can get behind

MeUndies often has three agents, along with Lynch, working to resolve customer service inquiries on Instagram at the same time. When the team was still doing so natively, they had to be careful not to duplicate efforts or overtake another agent’s conversation.

Previously, there were no time stamps on individual messages and no visibility into which agent sent each message. Customers would see read receipts, so in instances where MeUndies needed more time to craft a response, it would appear as if they’d left the customer on read. Those are all issues Sprout’s Instagram DMs integration solved.

“Now, we can easily see who has responded in a long message history. Our team members can also easily assign messages as Tasks to themselves or another agent if their shift is ending,” said Lynch. “Even the little things like collision warnings in Sprout, which tell us when another agent is typing a reply, are critical to us. These features have made an immense difference in the overall quality of our customer care.”

Message tagging is also highly valuable to MeUndies as it helps the customer experience team track different inquiry types and gives leadership across the organization visibility into what is happening on social.

“We tag everything. So, if someone asked us about billing issues that we’ve resolved on Instagram, for example, we could easily pull the Tag Report and share that data with them,” said Lynch. “We’re also in the process of syncing this with our entire company so that data funnels into a centralized system. That’s going to give leadership a really good top-down view, and they quickly see how our customers on social relate and differ from customers reaching out on our other support channels.”

Underwear and customer care for every body

With Sprout Social, MeUndies’ Instagram customer care strategy is more seamless, consistent and personalized. “Our mindset at MeUndies is to embrace being unique. We carry that passion over to social. We never just copy and paste responses even if there’s a standard answer,” said Lynch. “Now that our workflow is integrated into Sprout and we’ve eliminated manual processes, we can focus on what really matters: providing the best customer experience possible.”

Learn how your business can benefit from Sprout Social’s customer care and messaging capabilities. Request a free hands-on demo today.

Download PDF