Retailers like Pact, MaryRuth’s and Ollie turn customer experience into a growth function

At Gladly Connect Live this May in Atlanta, leaders from Pact, MaryRuth’s and Ollie will share how they rebuilt CX into a revenue-generating function. The numbers are striking, but the more interesting story is the thinking that got them there.

Pact turned its website chat into a marketing channel

Sustainable clothing brand Pact makes it easy to get dressed in a way that’s better for the planet with its organic cotton basics that are GOTS- and Fair Trade-certified, and carbon-neutral. When Lauren Inman-Semerau joined the company as vp of customer experience, her first challenge was to rebuild Pact’s CX function from the ground up. 

She launched AI-powered chat in October 2025 — before Pact’s biggest sales months of the year. Through the holiday peak season, AI resolved 50% of customer conversations. The resolution rate is now at 57%, a number Inman-Semerau attributes less to the platform than to how she set it up — specifically, the investment she made in answer quality before launch rather than after. 

Once that foundation was stable, she tested leveraging chat as a proactive marketing tool. Now, Inman-Semerau meets weekly with the e-commerce team to review inventory and sales data. When a product generates a surge in returns, chat can go live on that product page and offer extra help with personalized size recommendations, styling suggestions and more — moving excess inventory before it hits the sale rack, without a discount. Future-forward, her team will experiment with offering surprise-and-delight moments in the same way. 

During the holidays, the team piloted chat-initiated conversations on gift card pages — deployed strategically, not site-wide — to deliver targeted, memorable experiences without overwhelming the entire site. The result: chat is converting at 17%, against a standard industry website conversion rate of 2%–5%.  

“AI-powered chat is a cross-functional role, not just support,” Inman-Semerau said. “You can hit multiple KPIs and goals when you’re building it out. You can take away those easy conversations, and you can start to hit sales goals.”

MaryRuth’s solved a fragmentation problem — and found a revenue channel

MaryRuth’s is a fast-growing DTC wellness brand that sells vitamins, supplements and health products. The brand had more than doubled its order volume since 2022, but its infrastructure hadn’t kept pace — the CX team was managing four disconnected platforms, each handling a different channel with none of them talking to each other.

When a customer called after sending an email, agents had no way to see it. When someone texted after leaving a voicemail, those were two separate conversations in two separate systems. Jim Rodden, chief people officer at MaryRuth’s, watched a strong team work harder than they should have had to. 

“There were times where we were missing phone calls or missing chats because somebody was focused on email, and we couldn’t move them over quickly enough,” Rodden said.

Consolidating onto a single platform eliminated the fragmentation. Separate conversations became one continuous thread. The 48-hour email backlog disappeared. The CX team achieved a 35% efficiency gain within two months — eliminating time spent playing catch-up across disconnected systems.

That efficiency created capacity for things that hadn’t been possible before: a QA program; an analytics function; and a brand training module built around how MaryRuth’s actually talks to customers. The team also built WREN, an AI assistant, which launched on email with a 30% resolution rate in its first week. 

From there, the team developed a continuous improvement cycle, using internal QA, customer feedback and human evaluation to coach and refine WREN’s responses over time. The resolution rate climbed to 44.5% overall. Customers sometimes leave positive feedback for responses the human CX agent never wrote; they just approved what WREN had already drafted.

The retention numbers followed. The CX team now saves 20% of cancellation conversations and generates three times the cost-per-contact revenue — not by pushing customers to stay, but by diagnosing what went wrong and fixing it.

“We’re not trying to save for save’s sake,” Rodden said. “We’re finding what’s wrong and then getting them into the right product or the right cadence.”

The CX team is now one of MaryRuth’s top monthly revenue-producing departments.

Ollie had to prove CX could drive revenue and built the data to show it

Ollie delivers fresh, human-grade pet food on a subscription basis — meals customized to each dog’s breed, age and caloric needs. It’s a premium product in a category where the customer relationship is deeply personal, and where churn is existential. When Benjamin Devey joined as senior director of customer experience in 2022, he set out to build a CX operation that matched the product.

When he proposed building a dedicated sales function inside CX operations, Ollie’s CEO pushed back with a pointed question: “Are we just onboarding customers who would have converted anyway?”

That question forced Devey to prove — not assume — the answer. He built proactive chat into the website, deployed SMS campaigns to reach at-risk subscribers and trained the team for consultative conversations, rather than transactional ones. Then he ran a cohort analysis comparing CX-onboarded customers against every other acquisition channel.

CX-onboarded customers showed higher first-to-second order retention, higher three-month retention and greater lifetime value than customers acquired any other way.

The AI layer — which the team named Astro, after the Jetsons’ dog on the futuristic TV show — now resolves 60% of conversations and handles the equivalent of six full-time staff members. When a customer reaches out on a Saturday night about canceling, Astro responds immediately. By Monday morning, the CX conversation has already happened and the subscription is intact.

Ollie also connected conversation data to order attribution via Snowflake’s data clean rooms, building a dashboard called Watchdog that the food product team checks daily. Spikes in thawed packages or consistency complaints now trace back to specific fulfillment centers before they become brand problems.

The CX team scaled from 20 to 50 people while improving overall contact efficiency by 30% and reducing platform costs by 15%. Instead of defending its budget, it’s one of Ollie’s growth levers.

What these brands aren’t saying

None of these CX leaders would describe what they built as a technology deployment. Yes, the platforms matter, and the resolution rates matter. But what drove results in each case was a change in how CX leadership defined its own mandate.

Pact rebuilt CX around a cross-functional model. MaryRuth’s measured success by revenue contribution, not ticket volume. Ollie proved its value with a cohort analysis, not an anecdote. In each case, the CX leader had to reframe the function before the technology could act in a meaningful way.

At Gladly Connect Live, May 4–6 in Atlanta, these CX leaders will share the decisions, the missteps and the frameworks behind the numbers.

• Inman-Semerau will share the vendor evaluation process that got Pact to this point, the business case she built to get C-Suite sign-off and the phase-by-phase framework she uses to pitch AI as both a cost and revenue play.
  
• Devey will share the methodology behind Ollie’s cohort analysis and what it took to get leadership aligned around CX as a revenue function — including what they’d do differently.
  
• Rodden will share what the consolidation process looked like in practice — including how a planned eight-week implementation finished in four — and how MaryRuth’s now measures CX as a revenue function.

The question worth sitting with before then: what is your CX team actually for?

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