Bared customers tend to buy one pair, then come back for another. The shoes fuse good looks with all-day wearability, a combination that draws people in. But what keeps them is the full package: a product they love, backed by service that makes them feel it.
“They come to us for the product, and they love the customer service,” says Alexandra McNab, Chief Operating Officer at Bared and a 12-year veteran of the company.
That service sets a high bar. In a store, a customer can try a 38 and a 39, the black and the pink, and walk around in front of a mirror. Online, Bared works hard to recreate that. The team will send a second size at no charge and tell the customer to keep both until they decide. They will spend twenty minutes on the phone talking through how the Cygnini sits on the foot compared to the Sylph, or whether the silver or the gold works better with the blue dress. Return postage is on Bared. Across roughly 450 products, online customer service team members are expected to speak with the same authority as the in-store team, and every new style gets tried on by the team so they can.
“We’re never going to have an issue with our team being on the phone with a customer for 20 minutes talking through the fit of a shoe, because that is exactly what we want them to do,” says Erin McDiarmid, Customer Service Platform and Automations Lead. “They are all people people, and that’s really what sets our brand and our customer service apart.”
The gift card sitting behind 300 emails
The constraint was never the hard conversations, but everything stacked in front of them.
Bared runs two flash sales a year, and volume spikes hard around them. Scaling the team through those weeks is difficult because product knowledge takes months, not a week, so a casual hire cannot simply be added to the roster for sale. Email was the pressure point. Thousands arrive every week, and before Sierra, every single one was answered by hand. A large share of them were transactional: resend my gift card, send me a return label, tell me where my order is.
“If a customer’s email goes into an inbox that’s got 300 other emails in it, and all that customer wanted was for their gift card to be re-sent, and we don’t get back to them for 24 hours, that’s really disappointing for them,” McNab says. “They wanted to buy shoes. And if it’s during a sale, potentially those shoes have then sold out.”
That is the business cost of a slow inbox at a brand built on loyalty. A customer waiting 36 hours for a two-second task is a customer whose sale can evaporate, and whose next purchase is a little less certain.
It weighed on the team, too. “If I go into the customer service office two weeks after a sale, every single person in that room genuinely is upset that the emails have built up, and customers are potentially waiting two days for a response,” McNab says. “They care.”
An agent that does things, not just says things
Before Sierra, Bared had a decision-tree chatbot on live chat and nothing at all on email. Customers got stuck in flows, and a single wording change meant hunting through multiple branches to update it.
The requirement going into the evaluation was specific: an agent that only generated a response was not enough. “Really having something that could take an input, chain together a series of actions, and return a response to a customer is what we were looking for,” McNab says.
Bared went from kickoff to live in five weeks with chat, and some email journeys. McDiarmid and her team built and now maintain the journeys themselves, adding at least one new journey every week, including FAQs, shoe care, sizing and fit advice, returns and exchanges.
The one that best captures how Bared thinks is a journey McDiarmid built for the days around a flash sale. Bared does not announce sales in advance, so a handful of customers always buy a few days before the price drops, and are then disappointed that they have paid full price for an item they could then buy at a cheaper price. When asked, the agent checks the purchase date, checks whether the item is still in stock, and issues a store credit for the difference, with no team member involved and no questions asked.
“We could tell the customer to return the shoe, get a refund, and then repurchase it,” McNab says. “But that’s not great customer service, and they might then miss out - styles can sell quickly in a sale. At the end of the day, we value the customer’s time, we value their money, and we value them.”
Every conversation starts with a customer who hasn’t been waiting
Two months in, the agent resolves about 30% of email volume and 52% of chat, and both climb weekly as McDiarmid’s team adds and enhances journeys. A meaningful share of the remaining escalations are deliberate: Bared decides which scenarios it wants a team member on, and reports those separately from cases where the agent could not find an answer. That second number is small.
The clearer result is what the team’s day looks like now. Complex cases arrive pre-qualified, with the order number and context already gathered, so an agent can act immediately instead of trading emails for twelve hours. The 300-email backlog is gone.
“The difference between trying to help a customer who is already frustrated because they’ve been waiting 24 or 48 hours, versus a customer whose live chat you picked up right away, is substantial,” McNab says. “The interactions our team are having are more positive, and they’re able to help much faster.”
For a brand whose repeat business is built on how it handles the moment something goes wrong, that is the number that matters. “Any business is going to muck up. Shoes are shoes, and you are going to have shipping delays and little faults in leather,” McNab says. “What you really build your reputation on is how you help when something does go wrong, and how quickly and how empathetically you’re able to help them.”
One customer put it more simply in a chat log the team now passes around: “This is the best ‘AI bot’ I’ve ever dealt with.”
Asked to sum up what the shift has meant, McNab does not reach for a metric.
“It’s letting us live up to our own expectations,” she says. “We genuinely care an enormous amount about our customers and their experience of our product and our brand, and it’s frankly disappointing when we can’t deliver the service we want to. Not having that as a burden for our customers or for our team is really allowing the team to feel like they are doing as good a job as they are doing.”
