How Fuel Meals Transformed CX from Cost Center to Revenue Driver

Meal delivery services are highly competitive. Fuel Meals stands out by laser-focusing on empowering customers to reach their nutrition, macros, and fitness goals.

They faced the same challenge that many growing D2C brands face: scaling personalized customer support with limited resources. 

Working with Ciao CX, a customer experience consultancy agency founded in 2023, Fuel Meals transformed their one-person support operation into a proactive, multi-channel engagement.

The challenge

When Ciao began working with Fuel Meals, a single agent was juggling multiple urgent support channels—SMS, email, and chat—while trying to maintain quality customer service. 

"Our first response time was over 20 hours,” explained Anya Kelly, founder of Ciao CX. “Fuel Meals had one person managing SMS, email, and chat. As you can imagine, having some channels requiring urgency takes away time from other channels.”

This led to a few different challenges: 

• Fuel Meals is a small to medium-sized business that needed to bootstrap efficiently while providing a great customer experience.
• Timing was everything. Because they offer a weekly subscription service, they needed consistent, reliable support to help customers manage their subscriptions promptly.
• The nutrition space has a ton of (often conflicting) information. This meant that customers often have product questions that needed immediate attention during high-intent purchase moments. For example, while browsing the meal plans, they might have questions about customization options that heavily influence their decision to purchase.
• Having slow response times during these purchase moments meant lost sales. 
• Their demographic is heavily focused on fitness and health outcomes. They needed detailed product knowledge and personalized recommendations.
• Fuel Meals wanted to be present on all essential channels for their customers. SMS and chat were paramount because they provided instant support, but email was still relevant.

Unsurprisingly, all of this meant that their team had no capacity for relationship-building, proactive outreach, or account management. 

"From a CX perspective, my goal is always to transition teams from being that sort of reactive support to something more personal and proactive," Anya noted.

The solution

Many companies implement an AI agent to help with post-sale questions, focused on supporting existing customers. 

Fuel Meals took a different approach. While they needed a solution to help with post-sale subscription management, they also wanted something versatile that could help pre-sale. 

Siena stood out for a few reasons.

Personalized product recommendations

Siena was able to provide sophisticated and personalized recommendations to their customers.

"Customers need personalization and want that high-touch, concierge-level consultation. Siena's instrumental because it knows all of the information about our products and can tailor meal plans, suggestions, and even programs based on the specific customer wants," said Anya.

This meant that Siena could provide nutrition guidance based on fitness goals or match their dietary preferences–the type of personalized attention that would be extremely difficult to provide pre-sale via human support. 

Personas tailored by channel

Fuel Meals were able to implement Siena across all customer communication channels, providing consistent support through:

• Live chat on product detail pages
• SMS support
• Email communication
• Social media engagement

"I wanted a tool applicable not just for chat but also with SMS and traditional email," Anya explains. "Having that consistent brand voice, tone, and style across channels is a much more holistic way to evaluate an AI partner."

Siena’s Personas are a unique feature that allows brands to define a voice for each channel. This voice can be consistent without seeming like a bot trying to embed the same volume of information in an SMS as it might send via email. 

That makes it able to maintain high-quality responses that sound almost human across all channels. 

"It is the easiest, most human, lightest lift AI tool that covers every CX channel you need."

Quick and easy implementation

The implementation process was notably straightforward. 

Siena offers a couple of features that allowed Fuel Meals to get started straight away:

• The most common automations templates are set up with key integrations like Shopify, so you can instantly automate queries like “Where is my order?” or “I’d like to cancel my subscription.” 
• Knowledge sources provide a way to integrate existing help or website content, which can help customers answer a large portion of their questions. 

"You don't need an expert in AI to be able to implement it and implement it well," Anya emphasized. "Someone who doesn't have massive tech skills can implement it and see the results basically overnight." 

This ease of implementation is particularly crucial for a small team with limited technical resources. Siena also offers a reasoning feature that makes debugging and auditing responses easy. 

Native quality assurance metrics

Siena automatically calculates a Customer Experience Performance (CXP) metric for every interaction and automation, so you can easily identify opportunities for improvement. 

"CXP is almost like Siena's self-diagnosed CSAT," Anya explained. This metric made it possible to see which automations performed well and which needed improvement instantly. 

Beyond operational improvements, working with metrics always serves a strategic purpose. 

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"Seeing the CXP score not only helps you audit your existing flows but also gives you the insights you need to advocate for the customer in other business areas, the power is in the data. Being able to combine what we have in the Siena platform in terms of customer experience and quality and the value it drives from a time-saving perspective is your ammo to be able to push initiatives that benefit the customer, the team, and ultimately, the entire business." -- Anya noted

The results

Fuel Meals could see a substantial impact in a short time. 

• First response time was reduced from over 20 hours to under 3 minutes. 
• 45% automation rate was achieved within the first few weeks.
• They cut operational costs for the team by 50%.

Siena helped Fuel Meals transform their approach to CX. They could: 

• Automate routine subscription management tasks.
• Provide immediate pre-purchase support.
• Free human agents up for high-value interactions. 
• Have the capacity for proactive customer outreach. 

"Siena has helped massively turn the CX team into retention drivers of the business," Anya noted. 

"We've been able to divert resources away from those standard reactive questions that customers shouldn't need to reach out about to unique relationship-building moments from live agents checking in on the health of every customer." The result is happier customers, a healthier team, and a more sustainable business. 

"It's the perfect solution for traditional ecommerce brands in this arena. Because it really does everything that it says it will.”

Looking ahead

For Fuel Meals, implementing Siena helped transform their team into strategic account managers who have high-value and high-impact conversations with their customers every day. 

“The point is never to replace the team,” explained Anya. “My goal is always to show CX as a retention arm of the business. We can now do things like touch base with customers in their first two weeks of using the product.” 

As they continue to scale, their CX team is a key contributor to business success and long-term customer loyalty. 

Ready to turn your CX team into a revenue driver? Siena can help you achieve quick response times while empowering your team to build deeper customer relationships. Book your free demo today!

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