How Bobbie Set Out to Raise Its Contact Rate and Tripled Automation in Three Weeks

“I want a customer that is standing in the formula aisle at Target to be like, oh, yeah, let me reach out to Bobbie so they can support me.”

— Hadas Drutman, Director of CX, Bobbie

That’s the moment Hadas Drutman builds for. She is Director of Customer Experience at Bobbie, the organic infant formula brand, and previously led member experience at Seed and retail experience at Glossier.

At Bobbie, she oversees the team and the infrastructure behind every one-on-one conversation with a parent, and her goal is for Bobbie to be the resource parents lean on when decisions feel heavy. That puts her at odds with most of the industry. She wants more parents reaching out, and with Siena, Bobbie is ready for them.

“Deflection should never be the goal”

Hadas sorts every conversation into two kinds. “I want contacts like ‘where’s my order?’ or damage inquiries to go down,” she says. “But inquiries that allow us to show up as Bobbie and to educate and support are the ones that we want going up.”

The second kind is where her team earns its title. “I don’t like calling agents agents, because they’re true specialists,” she says. They educate parents, build relationships, and help families through decisions that are “really heavy and sometimes challenging and confusing.” To Hadas, that is the brand at work. “Deflection, in my mind, should never be the goal for CX,” she says, “if it’s really engraved in the company’s DNA.”

Bobbie’s previous platform kept the first kind in the way. After a year, automation was stuck at around 19%, and any small change needed the vendor’s help. “There wasn’t any self-serve,” Hadas says. “It became a weight on our team’s day-to-day instead of something that allows us to elevate.”

Leaving meant walking away from a year of implementation work and starting from scratch. “We knew we could do better,” she says.

Siena’s place on the team

Bobbie brought Siena in with a lane of its own. It launched on email and SMS, which split Bobbie’s volume roughly 50/50, and recently took on social DMs, which Bobbie runs as a service channel like any other. The work now divides like this:

Getting there took two to three weeks. Bobbie already had a distinct brand voice and “a very, very specific vision on how we want the agent to respond,” so the team tuned what it had instead of starting over. A dedicated owner on Hadas’s team worked weekly with Siena’s deployment team, who, she says, “knew the ins and outs of our queue.” Hadas is clear it took real commitment: “It was a full time job.” Automation reached 55%.

What she values most is the control. “The ability to self-serve and tweak as we go was a game changer,” she says.

“Why would Siena not?”

Bobbie gives Siena the same refund authority its frontline agents have, a call many brands are nervous to make. Hadas sees it as a matter of consistency. “Siena is an agent, right?” she says. It comes from “realizing that it’s an agent on your team that needs to be treated equally in many ways.”

“Why would Siena not?” she adds. “The benefit of doing that is way higher than the risk of doing the wrong refund.”

The same principle runs through quality. Bobbie built a full QA program on Siena that reviews every ticket, and human and AI conversations are held to the same standards. Before, the team reviewed human tickets by hand and “were barely able to get a 20% sample.” The new program came with an instant $30K in annual savings, and “coaching became more meaningful,” Hadas says.

It runs through Bobbie’s voice, too. The team invested in making sure there is no gap in tone between Siena and its specialists, so when a conversation moves from one to the other, “it’s not a clunky experience.”

“We are not treating the AI agent as an AI agent, if that makes sense. … Our AI agent needs to sound exactly like our human agent.”

— Hadas

17 seconds at 3 a.m.

One mom realized she had never canceled her subscription after her baby graduated from formula. She wrote in at 3 a.m., “because she was up, obviously,” Hadas says. Siena issued the refund in 17 seconds.

“She did not expect someone to follow up within 17 seconds,” Hadas says.

For her, that is what quality of service looks like. “I think speed is a huge part of that,” she says. An answer that lands while a parent is still thinking about the problem takes it off her plate for good. “At least I am very impatient. I need things solved on the spot.”

What went down, what went up

Down: order-status and cancellation tickets in specialists’ queues, $30K a year in costs, and the wait for a 3 a.m. refund, now 17 seconds.

Up: automation, from 19% to 55% in two to three weeks; quality review, from a 20% sample to every ticket; and SLAs, now hit “in a very comfortable way.”

“Empathy is not tone”

With the transactional load off their plates, Bobbie’s specialists can give complex cases the time they need.

“I think empathy is not tone,” Hadas says. “Empathy is truly being an investigator, being able to compile all the information … and then figure out a solution that is for that specific case. The ability to do that without rushing, without the need to immediately close a ticket, is really meaningful.”

The team has started reaching out first, too. When a parent ends up with two subscriptions, Bobbie cancels one and lets them know before they have to notice. “It may seem small,” Hadas says. “And it’s also not something a business would do.”

Siena is changing how Bobbie measures all of it. With every ticket running through Siena, the team has started tracking a customer experience score built on sentiment and effort, including “the ability to measure how hard the customer had to work in order to get the response they needed.” CSAT, by comparison, tells her little. “Nobody really fills those,” she says.

“We can handle it”

Hadas can say she wants more contact because of what now sits underneath her team. “The reason why I’m able to even say that is because I’m very confident in the infrastructure I have, because we have Siena,” she says. “We can have way more tickets coming in, and we can handle it.”

Her advice to other brands follows from there: pick a partner that shares your philosophy.

“What stood out with Siena for us is you have built an empathetic agent since day one. For an AI tool to work for you, it needs to do way more than just respond to your tickets.”

— Hadas

Siena answers for Bobbie around the clock, in Bobbie’s voice. Hadas’s specialists spend their hours where she wants them: teaching parents about feeding, turning complaints around, and seeing complex cases through.

Based on a conversation with Hadas Drutman, Director of CX at Bobbie. With Siena, Bobbie tripled its automation rate, from 19% to 55% in two to three weeks, moved quality review from a 20% sample to every ticket, saved $30K a year, and refunded a parent at 3 a.m. in 17 seconds.

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