Magnolia Customer Care: Operating Standards and Practical Playbook

Overview and Mission

Magnolia Customer Care exists to make every customer interaction fast, correct, and empathetic while creating measurable business value. We target repeatable, auditable processes backed by clear service levels and a culture of continuous improvement. The program below is designed for a small-to-mid team (5–30 agents) and scales by adding capacity and automation in predictable increments.

Our objectives are simple and numeric: reduce time-to-answer and time-to-resolution, raise first-contact resolution, and surface product insights to Magnolia’s product, logistics, and finance teams. All goals are tied to weekly, monthly, and quarterly targets to avoid vanity metrics and to ensure we can attribute revenue protection or expansion (retention, upsell) directly to support outcomes.

Support Channels and Hours

Coverage strategy

Standard hours: 08:00–20:00 local, Monday–Saturday, with on-call for Priority incidents 24/7. This schedule covers 88–92% of inbound volume for consumer-facing businesses in North America while minimizing night differential costs. For B2B or global coverage, add a second pod in a +5 to +8 hour time zone to achieve full 24/5 coverage without overtime.

Channel mix targets: 50–60% chat/messaging, 25–35% email/tickets, 10–20% voice. Chat resolves quickly and is cheaper per contact; voice remains crucial for escalations, accessibility, and complex issues. Publish channel availability clearly (e.g., chat 08:00–20:00, phone 09:00–18:00) and automatically deflect to email after-hours with a stated reply window.

Service Levels and KPIs

Measurable targets

Speed: Average Speed of Answer (voice) ≤ 30 seconds; chat pickup ≤ 60 seconds; email first response time: 90% within 4 business hours, 100% within 1 business day. Resolution: First-Contact Resolution ≥ 70% for general queue; Average Handle Time (voice) 4–7 minutes; Average Resolution Time (cases) ≤ 24 hours for non-severity incidents.

Quality and sentiment: CSAT ≥ 4.6/5 with ≥ 25% survey response rate; Transactional NPS after case closure ≥ +40; QA score ≥ 90% using a weighted rubric (accuracy, policy adherence, tone, and next steps). Report weekly on SLA attainment, backlog age, reopen rates, and the top five drivers by volume and by dissatisfaction (CSAT ≤ 3).

Contact Paths and Escalation

Severity definitions and time-bound ownership

All inbound contacts are tagged with a severity and routed accordingly. Severity is determined by business impact (financial loss, safety risk, outage), customer tier, and regulatory obligations. Publish the following timelines internally and show the relevant ones externally (status page, help center) to set precise expectations.

Use this laddered approach to reduce resolution time without over-escalating. Each tier must document findings before handoff to avoid resets. Incidents older than their SLA breach time require a visible timer and a red status in the queue.

• Severity 1 (outage, safety, or legal exposure): response ≤ 15 minutes, live bridge in 30 minutes, hourly updates until resolved; L3 Engineering or Ops owns, Care provides comms.
• Severity 2 (major degradation or multi-customer impact): response ≤ 1 hour, updates every 4 hours; L2 Specialist owns with L3 on standby.
• Severity 3 (single-customer, standard issues): response within normal SLAs; L1 resolves, escalate to L2 if not closed within 24 hours.
• RMA/Returns exceptions: confirm eligibility within 1 business day; shipment label within 1 business day after approval; refund within 5–7 business days post-receipt.

Tools, Integrations, and Data Retention

System of record and interoperability

Adopt a single ticketing CRM as the system of record with native or API integrations to telephony, chat, email, order management, and billing. Mandatory data points on every case: customer ID, order/subscription ID (if applicable), channel, reason code, severity, SLA timer, and resolution code. Automations should create and update status pages, trigger customer notifications, and open problem records for recurring defects.

Retention standards: tickets and metadata retained 24 months by default; call recordings 180 days; chat transcripts 12 months; post-resolution attachments 90 days unless contractually required longer. Automatically purge PII from free-form fields after 30 days where not legally required. Maintain a data processing inventory and vendor list for compliance audits.

Self-Service and Knowledge Base

Deflection without dead ends

Build a searchable help center with article freshness dates, clear steps, and screenshots or short clips (≤ 90 seconds). Aim for at least 40% self-service rate (customers find an answer without opening a ticket) and search abandonment below 15%. Each public article must map to a corresponding internal article with deeper troubleshooting and policy details.

Track top searches with no results and create content within 5 business days. Set review cadences: high-traffic articles quarterly, low-traffic semiannually, and release-linked content aligned to launch. Require change logs and version numbers to support audits and rollbacks.

• Account and access: password reset, MFA issues, email change, account deletion request steps and expected timelines.
• Orders and billing: order tracking, delivery windows by region, invoice lookup, payment failures, refunds, credits, and tax questions.
• Product use: quick-start guides, error code matrix, configuration checklists, and compatibility charts.
• Returns and warranty: eligibility, timelines, what’s covered, evidence required (photos/serials), and shipping label instructions.
• Privacy and data: how to submit a data access or deletion request, data categories processed, and retention periods.

Quality Assurance, Training, and Staffing

Build skill and consistency

Onboarding plan (minimums): 2 weeks product and policy, 1 week tools and workflows, 1 week nesting with shadowing and reverse shadowing. Require role certification with ≥ 90% score before full queue access. Ongoing: 30 minutes of coaching per agent every two weeks, weekly calibrations across QA and team leads, and quarterly recertification on critical policies.

QA weighting: Accuracy 40%, Policy/Compliance 20%, Resolution/Next Steps 20%, Empathy/Tone 20%. Evaluate at least 4 contacts per agent per month (mix of channels), with more for new hires or those below target. Close the loop: agents acknowledge QA within 48 hours; supervisors verify action items by the next 1:1.

Staffing math: plan for 75–85% occupancy with 25–30% shrinkage (meetings, breaks, PTO, training). As a starting point, one fully ramped agent comfortably handles 50–70 email cases/day, 12–18 chats/hour (concurrency 2–3), or 8–12 voice calls/hour, depending on complexity.

Cost Model and ROI

Transparent per-contact economics

Example monthly budget for a 6-person pod (5 agents + 1 lead): salaries $21,000–$29,000; benefits/taxes at 20–25% adds $4,200–$7,250; SaaS stack (ticketing, telephony, chat, QA) at $80–$180 per user/month totals $480–$1,080; telephony usage $0.01–$0.03/min with 40,000 minutes ≈ $400–$1,200; training/QA stipends $300–$600. Total: $26,000–$38,000/month depending on market and tools.

If the pod handles 8,000 contacts/month, cost per contact ranges $3.25–$4.75. Improve by increasing self-service (reduce inbound by 10–20%), raising FCR (fewer reopens), and shifting volume to chat from voice where appropriate. Track avoided costs (e.g., fewer replacements), saved revenue (retentions), and earned revenue (cross-sell) to show ROI beyond cost per contact.

Compliance, Security, and Privacy

Protect customers and the company

Customer data is accessed on a least-privilege model with role-based access control and enforced MFA. Encrypt in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest using your platform’s managed keys. Maintain audit logs for at least 12 months covering login, export, deletion, and permission changes. For call recording and monitoring, obtain consent; if operating in two-party-consent jurisdictions, ensure dual consent prompts before recording.

Regulatory timelines: respond to GDPR data subject requests within 30 days (extension documented if needed) and to CCPA/CPRA verified requests within 45 days. Breach notification for EU personal data follows the 72-hour rule to supervisory authorities; customers are notified without undue delay when risk is high. Execute DPAs with all processors, maintain Standard Contractual Clauses for cross-border transfers, and document data residency options if offered.

Retention and purging: delete payment tokens, IDs, or other sensitive PII from free-form notes; store only in the authorized vault/provider. Automatically purge inactive accounts after the stated retention period and provide export options to customers before deletion. Run quarterly access reviews and pen-test your help center and integrations at least annually.

Voice of the Customer and Continuous Improvement

Turn conversations into action

Publish a weekly issues dashboard: top five contact drivers, deflection rate, FCR gaps, and defect links for engineering or operations. Hold a 30-minute cross-functional review with Product, Ops, and Marketing to prioritize two fixes that will eliminate the most contacts or dissatisfaction in the next sprint. Track the cumulative contact reduction and CSAT lift attributable to each change.

Monthly, deliver a root-cause Pareto (80/20) and a 12-month trendline for SLA attainment, cost per contact, and retention impact. Tie at least one OKR per quarter to a customer care-led improvement, such as “Reduce return-related contacts by 25% via packaging insert updates and proactive status emails,” and close the loop with before/after metrics.

How do I contact Magnolia Network customer service?

If for any reason you wish to contact us, please click here to send us an email. You can also send a letter to 900 Franklin Avenue, Waco, Texas 76701 United States or call us at 844-244-2006.

How do I contact Hearth and Hand with Magnolia customer service?

Help Center
We’re open Monday-Friday from 9 AM – 6 PM and closed on Saturdays and Sundays. You can reach us via chat by going to the Chat with Us button in the bottom right corner. You can reach us via email at [email protected].

How do I get in touch with Chip and Joanna Gaines?

Email Joanna Gaines on her Official Site, [email protected] (Magnolia Network), [email protected] (PR); [email protected] (Magnolia Market), or [email protected] (Magnolia Realty).

How do I contact Magnolia customer service?

Magnolia Support

1. Magnolia Care. Magnolia Care is our promise to deliver an exceptional level of customer service from consultation to installation and beyond.
2. Give Us a Call. 1-800-548-0828.
3. Terms and Conditions. See the full list of the Magnolia Care Terms and Conditions.