At A Glance

Birdy Grey was founded eight years ago to make shopping for bridesmaid dresses not only affordable but delightful. As director of CX at Birdy Grey, Nina Hadzi-Antich leverages AI to answer the most common issues and gives CX agents the authority to remedy trickier issues in real-time. As you read about the results, you’ll see how this approach has increased productivity and made Birdy Grey’s agents even more valuable to the company.

Who is Nina

Meet Nina Hadzi-Antich, Director of CX at Birdy Grey.

Nina’s CX journey

Nina has more than a decade of experience in CX. She started as an agent for MeUndies and then moved on to Parachute Home, where she got her first experience in operations. She then went to Jaanuu, a physician-founded startup that sells scrubs, and Rachel Zoe before arriving at Birdy Grey in 2023. “With every job there have been unique challenges,” Nina said. “Whether it’s product, whether it’s customer scaling, customer support. With Birdy Grey specifically, a lot of customers are first-time customers. We need to make it really, really easy for first-time customers otherwise, as our orders increase and as our customer list increases, so will our contacts. “So we've done a lot of work in streamlining processes.”

About Birdy Grey

Founded in 2017, Birdy Grey sought to bring a more millennial mindset to shopping for bridesmaid dresses, providing a seamless and easy alternative to what had been a time-consuming and expensive process. The thriving direct-to-consumer business surpassed $100 million in revenue last year, and while its offerings have expanded to include suits as well as pajamas and robes, the business is built around making things easy for brides as they plan their big day.

Birdy Grey’s team structure

Birdy Grey is a truly bi-coastal operation with a headquarters in the Fashion District of Los Angeles and an office in New York. The CX team Nina heads up is composed of four people who are largely remote. They have scaled up operations using two BPOs, one located in the Philippines and the other out of Serbia. This is the first time in Nina’s career she has worked with two BPOs, and she said it has been an eye-opening experience. “I love our agents so much,” she said. “They are truly the embodiment of our brand, and we just love working with both of our BPOs.”

Learning on the job

Birdy Grey utilizes its learning-management system (LMS) to train employees. That resource is an invaluable reference point, but Nina said the company has found it more effective to let new hires learn by doing. “We actually throw them in the trenches pretty quickly,” she said. “We start off with shadowing agents, but we are getting them in the queue relatively quickly and having them answer some emails and then direct follow-ups with our QA manager and with team leads as well.  A lot of communication happens during the training process.”

Empowering employees

When Nina came to Birdy Grey, she saw that agents were often forced to ask for permission before taking steps to remedy the situation. She wondered why. “Why do we need to slow down our agents,” she said, “and have them ask for permission to put expedited shipping on a replacement? That's just one example.” By consulting data, the team isolated the types of actions that were most frequently approved and then empowered agents to perform those actions without getting authorization. This step wound up saving more than time. “We've actually seen productivity increase,” Nina said. “We've seen CSAT increase. We have a very strong CSAT. I'm super proud of it. But really, it’s just empowering agents to make those decisions on their own. “I always say to agents, if you can tell me why you did this, why you refunded this person, and you can make a case for it, I will always be on your side.”

Quality control

At Birdy Grey, CX agents are asked to make extensive notes on each quality issue a customer experiences. This allows the company to identify–and remedy–the root cause of the issue. “I truly believe that Birdy Grey is one of the best bridesmaid dresses on the market,” Nina said, “but the only way that we've been able to get there has been through meticulous documentation when there are issues so we can address them head-on.”

AI or no AI?

Prior to 2020, Nina was admittedly hesitant to employ AI. “I just didn't think that the technology was there yet,” she said.

That has changed as Birdy Grey is now using AI as part of its chat widget. More specifically, AI is used to help answer the two most frequent questions any E-Commerce company gets from its customers:

Where is a specific order at?

How do I make an exchange?

“That's where we've spent the most amount of time and effort with AI,” Nina said, “on our big-contact reasons, and chat has been incredibly successful. We've had a very healthy and high deflection rate.” AI is now being incorporated into the company’s email responses, and while that is progressing well, Nina thinks it’s a mistake to use AI across the board. “You’ve got to be very selective about which topics you feel comfortable with AI taking on,” she said. “AI works within customer service if there's very clear guardrails of what it will and won't answer.”

Give your customers a clear path

One of Nina’s priorities at Birdy Grey has been building systems that answer the most common customer questions without tapping an agent. She has also been firm about giving customers a direct path to speaking with an agent if that’s what they want. “If you call us, there's not a huge web in order to get connected to a live agent,” she said. “You'll be connected to a live agent within a minute. To me, that’s very important. I want to make it really easy. If you want to pick up the phone and call someone, there will be a friendly voice on the other line.”

Nina’s advice to other CX leaders

When asked for a golden nugget, she had an immediate answer: “Invest in your agents.” She wasn’t just talking about salaries and retention. “Spend time with your agents,” she said. “Continue to have one-on-ones throughout the year.” And for a company that uses BPOs, which Birdy Grey does, it means spending time with those agents as well. “Making them really feel like part of the company, that is going to elevate customer service,” she said. “If your agents are invested, if they see the products, feel the product, use the products. There's some BPO centers who've never even seen the product that they're talking about.  Send them the catalog. Send them the products. Have them try it on. Get their feedback.”