Molin is a great tool for enhancing your customer service and product recommendations game. We have been working with 700+ leading e-commerce companies in various fields and brought you one key example about how Molin can help you scale your business while also rationalising your cost structure. Keep reading to find out more.

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TL;DR

‍Challenge: E-commerce companies struggle with finding and retaining customer service representatives who are both proficient in problem solving for customers and expanding the company’s sales capabilities by being familiar with the product assortment and can recommend new products for clients via chat. These issues were prevalent for Lumenet before they started working with Molin back in April 2024.

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Solution: Molin can help with top-notch issue resolution for your community and also can learn the ins and outs of your product line to make the best recommendations for new customers at the right place (via chat – and soon email), at the right time – when buying intent is the highest.

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Results: Molin single handedly worked on 3.5k customer conversations. It resulted in a massive, 66% percent drop in Full-time employee needs for customer service, freeing up time – at least 200 working hours saved since April –,  talent – 3 people can work on initiatives that help the company scale further–, and treasure – at least $2.3k can be redirected towards new initiatives, new products or inventory–.

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The Challenge

Lumenet, established in 2012, is a leading Hungarian online retailer specializing in premium lighting solutions. It offers an extensive range of products including home, outdoor, and automotive lighting, as well as electrical accessories and tools. Renowned for its high-quality customer service, Lumenet has served ~700 000 households and received numerous industry awards. The company is recognized for its commitment to excellence and innovation, making it one of the most trusted names in the lighting industry in Hungary. 

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However to keep customer satisfaction high and their customer service team efficient, they face numerous challenges:

1. Too much internal effort is directed towards Customer Service
2. Hard to scale direct communication channels 
3. Large product assortment makes it hard for Customer Service colleagues to provide the best possible product recommendations.

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Too much internal effort is directed towards Customer Service: The core operations team at Lumenet consists of around a dozen people. Out of those, on average 4.5 of them were working on customer service related tasks from answering emails, through issue resolution to live chatting with clients. As the company set out to provide best in class customer service to differentiate themselves from others on the market, these numbers are understandable and were justified. However recent growth started to put more and more strass on the team and hiring more people in the customer service department has proven to be challenging due to lack of great candidates and also resource constraints. The 4.5 people working on customer service also have been with the company for a long time, their knowledge and experience could have been utilized way better in other aspects of the business.

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Hard to scale direct communication channels: Customer needs are rapidly changing and they want instant communication and instant information during their buying process and also when an issue arises. Scaling a customer support team while retaining high customer satisfaction that is a key aspect for Lumenet has proven to be very challenging: It is physically impossible to retain, or even improve the same response times, time to resolution metrics with linearly scalable human customer service representatives – see other factors above– while the number of messages and interactions scaled exponentially.

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Large product assortment makes it hard for Customer Service colleagues to provide the best possible product recommendations: A lesser known/utilized feature of great customer service is its ability to drive more sales through customer recommendations. When customers or prospective buyers contact the support team, more often than not their principle issue can be boiled down to the following: Is this product the right fit for me/ for my specific needs or not?

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“In today's day and age, it is not enough to be average in logistics, assortment or even in customer support if we want to compete…” – says Istvan Zabari, CEO @Lumenet

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A great customer service representative can drive the conversation, understand the customer needs and make a genuine recommendation about the product while also offering suitable alternatives from the assortment available. With exponentially increasing customer inquiries, a product line that has thousands of individual SKUs, the customer support team struggled to utilize the product recommendation aspect to drive more sales and reverted back to fast and satisfactory issue resolution.

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The Solution

When we first started to talk with Istvan Zabari, CEO of Lumenet early April, we quickly realized that Molin would provide the best possible solution for their growing customer support needs while also driving more sales via the channel. After swiftly laying out the groundworks, Lumenet integrated Molin by the end of April. With no time to waste, Molin got to work:

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1. Molin started to answer customer service questions directly from the website in multiple languages and collected all interactions into a neat and tidy backend that human customer service colleagues could easily use.

2. Molin quickly understood the context, the communication needs –and styles– that the customer service team already used and started answering multiple questions concurrently in that way. Also, when customers requested something that was above Molin’s paygrade, he quickly flagged escalated the question so a human can take over the chat to answer. The surprise: Some customers were unaware that they were speaking to an AI Assistant until that point.

3. Molin sees it all: He can access all your product assortment data through close integrations with most leading e-commerce engines on the market. This way, Molin can give details about the item’s specifications, share installation guides, provide live updates on product availability, even order status, and more! Molin understands the context and makes the best possible recommendations to the customer all live, within the chat function. Lumenet also integrated Molin into the product page, so prospective customers can initiate a chat session to get more information straight from there as well, see picture below.

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‍The blue button initiates a chat with Molin

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“It might have never been as important to innovate and improve to keep the competitive edge within the Hungarian e-commerce industry, as it is now, when more and more international entrants come to the market and they subdue it pretty quickly with their sophisticated technologies and abundant capital”  – adds Istvan

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The Results

Customer Service

Just a little over four months into the integration of Molin, Lumenet has seen the following major improvements in their operations:

1. They were able to significantly reduce their headcount working on customer support work, freeing up skillful and knowledgeable employees to work on other projects within the company that drive results more directly. The average FTE of 4.5 customer support workers dropped by 2/3rds to just 1.5.

2. Molin so far handled 3.5k conversations with customers and he wrote around 25k messages. This saved the company around 200-420 work hours since April, or 50-105 hours each month.

“Because of the massive oversupply of e-commerce shops, less and less attention is directed towards each one of them. If the customers need an answer at 2am, and they do not get it, they will spend their money elsewhere” – Istvan states.

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To put these results in perspective: with the reduction of the number of FTEs working on Customer service, Molin indirectly freed up $21.6k worth of resources, i.e. FTEs within the organization over the past four months, given that each customer service representative makes the average Hungarian gross salary of ~$1.8k. These people can now be redirected to work on other higher value add tasks, like improving the product offering, exploring new markets and so on. 

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If we take a more direct approach and concentrate solely on the amount of messages Molin has written, assuming that each message takes 30seconds to a minute to write, we can see that Molin freed up at minimum $2.3k-$4.7k worth of resources, i.e. working hours within the org. This calculation is without the related standby times, product research, issue resolution work that each answer takes in the backend from a customer service representative.

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Sales

On the sales side, thanks to Molin’s advanced contextualization capabilities and integrations with the e-commerce engines, in-chat recommendations became more precise and more spot on, fitting the exact customer needs better.

In the span of just four months, the conversion rate of Lumenet’s page grew 1.5x. This is largely thanks to Molin and its stellar recommendations.

A few closing words from Lumenet’s CEO

“Implementing Molin has reduced our overall customer service workload by at least 50%. This allows our team to focus on higher-value tasks like product and offering improvements, market expansion. Molin's efficiency in handling messages has also significantly saved us labor costs. I would highly recommend Molin for any organization looking to optimize their customer service operations and drive sales.”

– Istvan Zabari, CEO @Lumenet

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