Exploring the Post Buy Button Impact on Sales Performance with Brightpearl's Sara Arthrell

Did you know what happens after the buy button has a huge impact on sales to new customers as well as those who’ve experienced your post-buy-button processes. We get deep into this with Sara Arthrell from retail operations platform Brightpearl. 

Welcome to the eCommerce Growth Show brought to you by Segmentify, the fast lean learning machine, the fastest learning, most revenue generating personalisation platform for eCommerce.
Chloe Thomas:
Hello, we’re now up to episode five of this first ever series of the eCommerce Growth Show. This is the series where we’re focusing in on what you as a retailer need to know about to take your sales growth to the next level in 2020. Each episode focuses on a different area and we already spoken with Big Commerce’s Head of Europe, Mark Adams about how the shifts in the tech space can give you a competitive advantage. We were joined by Segmentify’s own Murat Soysal about the game changing way in which astute retailers are leveraging onsite and offsite personalisation algorithms. Gavin Laugenie from dotdigital joined us to talk about shifting your business from batch and blast to a communication strategy that mirrors the customer journey. Brian Mapley from Adyen was our most recent guest and he was all about mobile payments and internationalisation. And if you want to take your growth to the next level, you have to be on top of those three.
Chloe Thomas:
Each of those episodes is available for you to listen to right now via your podcast app of choice. Be that Apple podcast, Spotify, Podcast Addict or something else. Whichever one you’re listening via, please remember to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss our future series. Yes, there’ll be more coming after these ones.
Chloe Thomas:
In this episode, we’re shifting to look at how your post purchase activities can impact on your future sales growth and yes, that includes reviews. If you’re appreciating this brand new eCommerce podcast and you’d like to make sure Segmentify get me and Phill to do another series then please do put a review on Apple podcast or Spotify as we’d love to hear what you think. I’m Chloe Thomas, I’m the host of the eCommerce Masterplan podcast, best selling author of multiple books on eCommerce and cohost of this show too, as if you guys hadn’t worked that out by now. I’m joined on every episode of the series by Phill Kay from Segmentify. Hello Phill.
Phill Kay:
Hi Chloe. How are you doing?
Chloe Thomas:
I’m good, thank you. I’m intrigued to know why you wanted to include Brightpearl in this series.
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. Well Brightpearl is close to my heart. I actually used to work for Brightpearl for quite a long time and within the ecosystem of eCommerce I’ve always felt that the operational side has been a massive part of it. Obviously lots and lots of technologies are all about either acquisition or keeping customers on your website or getting the most conversion or order value and so on. And in some respects that’s a kind of almost an easier thing to engage a retailer with because that’s their bottom line, it’s the profit they’re trying to make.
Phill Kay:
But when I kind of worked at Brightpearl, it was so apparent that there was such a need for particularly multichannel retailers and you start throwing multiple channels for eCommerce transactions into the mix, maybe even some stores and even phone orders and things like that or B2B, you suddenly realise, actually it’s all very well getting customers, but if you don’t look after them in terms of how their services are then being experienced after the sale in terms of getting their products, being able to return the product, ship in a timely manner from different locations, etc. Suddenly it’s like wow, there’s a whole new sort of additional world behind the scenes that you could neglect. I thought, it would be important really because Brightpearl’s such a prevalent solution in that space, both here and obviously globally, that it’d be really good to get Sara to talk to the listeners and us about how they help in that side of things.
Chloe Thomas:
Excellent. And I’m really glad you’ve got them on because there’s some great topics coming up, we’re going to get into reviews. We’re going to get into the cost of customer acquisition, prepare to have your mind blown a little bit on that bit. And we are also obviously going to be talking about some of the ways in which you can work out how to improve that all important customer experience. Phill, are you ready to get our guest on?
Phill Kay:
Yep, let’s do it.
Chloe Thomas:
It’s time to welcome our guest. Sara Arthrell is the product marketing manager at Brightpearl. Brightpearl are a retail operations platform used by high growth merchants to manage their multichannel orders and inventory. That’s the bit of the eCommerce systems mix that people often don’t think of as being central to sales growth. Now, if you’re one of the people who thinks that it’s not important, you’re wrong. Prepare to be reeducated in today’s show. Sara is joining us to explain exactly how, all the way from Austin, Texas. Hello Sara.
Sara Arthrell:
Hello everyone. How’s everybody doing?
Phill Kay:
Hello Sara.
Sara Arthrell:
Hi.
Chloe Thomas:
We are good, thank you. Feeling somewhat colder than I imagine you are right now.
Sara Arthrell:
Yes, I imagine as well. I think it’s about 70 degrees Fahrenheit is the estimate for today.
Phill Kay:
Nice.
Sara Arthrell:
A little bit better than what you guys have I imagine.
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. Although it’s clear for once. The sun is actually out, which is nice.
Sara Arthrell:
Oh that’s good.
Phill Kay:
Blue sky but that’s about three times a year we get that.
Sara Arthrell:
They knew we were recording today, decided to make the sunshine.
Phill Kay:
Excellent. Well, so Sara, tell me, someone told me on the grapevine that you went to university in Vegas? Come on, please tell us what it’s like to be a student there.
Sara Arthrell:
Yes I did. The rumor is true. I sort of by luck ended out in Nevada and in Vegas specifically, much to even my own surprise. I transferred there for college and actually at the time I had never even visited Las Vegas so it was quite a culture shock, just given the obvious sort of reputation of Las Vegas. And I always like to tell people I’m very grateful that I’m not a gambler. I think that, that helped a lot living in that city. I was, I’ll be pretty transparent, not entirely focused on my studies, of course, particularly in my freshman year. But yeah, I actually ended up falling in love with it and ended up staying after I graduated for a couple years.
Phill Kay:
What? Falling in love with gambling.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, and I always try to tell people it’s an entirely different city when you live there. There’s some really cool stuff to do, sort of outside of the traditional reputation that it has. And so some really cool sort of local dive bars and lots of hiking stuff to do outside really good food and shopping.
Phill Kay:
And the weather as well, beautiful.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, the weather’s fantastic. It certainly gets warm in the summertime, but it’s a very dry heat, which I prefer. And everything’s air conditioned, so you sort of go from one place to another and you’re only hot for a little bit, but it’s a really great city. I shout out to a UNLV Runnin’ Rebs, but, and I actually, I’m lucky I have friends that are still there and I go back pretty often.
Phill Kay:
Oh cool. We’re really keen to understand how having the right back end system can help an eCommerce business grow, so why don’t you tell us all about that?
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, absolutely. When we think about growing a business there’s so many different directions that you can go in from maybe exploring new channels and markets to, of course, just cutting costs. But those efforts are really risky without really putting in the right research or even some investment from a money standpoint beforehand. And when I talk to retailers, I think there’s something that they can implement almost immediately, which is focusing on really perfecting that customer experience and really understanding how something like a backend system can help them with that process because it’s sort of on the back burner. And we’ve actually done some research pretty recently into this idea of the rising review culture and we found that 77% of poor reviews are related directly to issues that shoppers have after they click the buy button. By adding a back office solution to your tech stack, that really helps with things like automating those super annoying and very time consuming and very repeatable workflows.
Sara Arthrell:
Stuff like order management and they can share your pick-pack-ship processes are good in your warehouse while also helping to reduce like the room for any errors that happen that in turn would cause a poor customer experience. So when you’ve got software that helps really build on those workflows and create processes that retailers can then start focusing on the fun stuff and the ways of innovation that can actually take your business to the next level. Sort of not making the backend stuff an afterthought, really bringing that to the forefront and recognising that in the long run that is what’s going to grow your business. It’s something that, yeah, it’s sort of like a light bulb when we explain it to people. They’re like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense. I haven’t thought about it like that.”
Phill Kay:
Yeah, yeah. It’s intuitive if you’ve done it that way, actually based on research, about what would really matter to them as opposed to saying, “Hey, hey. We’ve got this multi channel system,” dah, dah, dah. You’re kind of saying, “Hold on it. There’s a real driver that we’re going to be able to help you.” No, that’s good.
Chloe Thomas:
And that stat Sara, that’s kind of mental. So 70% of poor reviews is because of what happens after the buy button. And if I think about the average eCommerce business I come across, 70% of effort is not being put into what happens after the buy button is it? We think of how much effort we spend on the pre-purchase experience and how little effort many people spend in the back of it. It just, it seems like an absolute no brainer to go get that sorted.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, and especially when you think about as soon as somebody hits that buy button, there’s at least 30 different steps that happen to get that item to your consumer. And so it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort and in theory if you mess it up, it’s really detrimental. And I think that’s where a lot of our sort of research around reviews and streamlining those operations come into play.
Chloe Thomas:
But of course the thing about them is, if you’ve got the right system in place, then once you set it up once, it should just for 90% of the customers just happen seamlessly. If you actually take the time and effort to work out what your process is and implement it with the right tech. It’s completely avoidable.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah. Especially when you can automate sort of those more average orders. The things that come in that are pretty standard, like just your normal order. If you can automate those, then you’re no longer having to hire a person to go in and look at every single order that comes through to make sure it’s okay. When you’re able to automate those processes and really bring to attention only the weird ones. Maybe ones that have a different amount of SKUs or have a super high amount of SKUs on them, things like that that then sort of get routed into your bucket for more attention. Now you’re starting to save tons of time, which sort of go back to that initial question of growing your business because you’re not spending that time doing those more menial tasks. Now you can focus on the cool, the fun, the marketing, going into new channels, exploring new partnerships, things like that.
Chloe Thomas:
And the cool thing about that is it makes the customer experience better for everyone because those people who’ve got the simple orders, it all just happens for them. And those people who’ve got the complicated orders, your team have the time to actually make sure that those huge orders or the orders going to difficult places can actually get to the right place. Then everybody has a great experience, which makes such a difference to the reviews, which is such a great way of tracking how well the business is performing.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah. And I think you’re exactly right, Chloe. And another stat that sort of always gets my attention is all around the cost of acquisition for retailers and the fact that it’s doubled in the last five years. And so there is so much more technology that we’re adding to our stack that has to help acquire these new customers from getting them to your website, to being on social media, all that kind of stuff that almost always you will lose money on the first sale because you’ve spent so much money getting them to you. The profit is just not there, which means it’s that much more important to get somebody for the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth sale. And if you do not have a good experience for that customer, then the likelihood of them coming back is really minimal. So it’s that much more important to create a good experience, especially on the first time but then every time after to be able to get that repeat business that is so important to really growing, especially in a world that’s usually pretty competitive for a lot of retailers out there.
Chloe Thomas:
That’s just throwing up so many questions in my head. But the first thing I say is doubled in the last five years? That’s crazy.
Sara Arthrell:
Well you think about the market is just becoming so competitive. You’ve got PPC and people, retailers are using agencies and they’re developing their websites to be bigger and better and faster. They’ve got email automation and I’m shockingly would not expect it or would expect it to increase even more just as that sort of trend continues.
Chloe Thomas:
I suppose when I first hear the stat I’m like, wow, that’s mad. But actually you think about it for about 30 well about half a second. You’re like, no, no, that does actually make sense. It makes complete sense.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah. And actually even sort of another, in our most recent research that we’ve done around retailers and their tech stack, we polled over 200 US retailers. And in that, we found that more than two thirds of decision makers in that realm believe that the investments in software for retail are actually going to increase even more in 2020. It’s just going to sort of continue down that path. That much more important.
Phill Kay:
Certainly. I was just reading something the other day where for the first time in England anyway, in Britain for the first time in a decade, eCommerce sales have begun to go down and they’ve been on the rise for the last 10 years. You bring that into the mix, and you bring the margins into the mix and you bring the cost of acquisition from all those other challenges you were talking about, Sara, and you can see how it’s going to get even more important in this year to invest properly in the technology for sure.
Sara Arthrell:
Exactly. And if you don’t, the consumers are going to go somewhere else, they’re going to go to your competitor, they’re going to find somebody who sells a very similar product but can get it to them easier and more efficiently. And that’s where their loyalty will lie.
Chloe Thomas:
It’s a bit like we’ve kind of, we’ve had the eCommerce marketplace, gold rush. Where we’ve, all the retailers have got in, all the new people have got in and we’ve all created these great, great businesses and it’s been like this land grab for consumer attention and now the consumers have now kind of reached their spending threshold for online and everyone’s are buying online and they know how much on average they’re going to spend online. Oh man, now we’ve got to compete with each other to get the spend? I actually have to give, care more about what service I’m giving and repeat purchase? Mental.
Sara Arthrell:
I know. And even, it opens up into brick and mortar too, which is becoming more popular even especially for those D to C, digitally native brands like Warby Parker and Bonobos. There, I’ve read recently that those digitally native brands are set to open 850 stores in the next five years, which creates processes like buy online, pickup in store, click and collect over in the UK that are also now opening up an ideal for customer experience that’s actually in the store. And those being done correctly. It’s just, it’s a wild world. I’m excited I get to be a part of it. It’s certainly challenging but not boring, that’s for sure.
Chloe Thomas:
Oh yeah. It’s never boring. For those listening who maybe at the start of this thought that the back office is just the back office, it just does stuff. And where I need to focus all my effort is on my Facebook ads. Hopefully, we’ve convinced them already why they should be paying a lot more attention to their back end, but, you do a lot of work and you speak to a lot of retailers who are trying to solve those back end problems. Where are the big gains to be made? Where does someone start if they’ve seen the light in 2020, they’ve gone, I need to sort out the back office.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah. If they’ve gotten to that point, typically, when you get to that realisation, I always like to instruct people to really pay attention to stuff out there that’s right in front of them like reviews that they’re getting online. Because usually when you identify trends in those reviews, that’s where you find that stat. Like, holy crap, this isn’t just about my product. This is about the stuff that’s happening all in the background. And so I think in general, once you are able to understand that aspect, then you come to something like Brightpearl and recognise, okay, how is this going to impact my entire business? How am I going to now be able to streamline all the stuff that happens that’s so critical to that operational efficiency? And when you look at those reviews, you guys know they have completely changed the consumer world and not just in retail, but in every single sector across every single industry.
Sara Arthrell:
So I use reviews every single time I buy something, whether it’s shoes or a car, or literally anything on Amazon. I will not part with something before checking for reviews. And even in addition to sort of that crazy stat that I mentioned earlier, we also found out that I’m not the only one when it comes to researching these reviews, that 95% of shoppers will read an online review before they make a purchase. And over 90% say that yeah, those reviews absolutely affect my buying decision. It’s pretty wild to actually trust a retailer, they’re looking at their reviews, they want to see at least anywhere from 30 to 35 positive reviews.
Sara Arthrell:
I think it’s important for retailers to recognise the power behind it and identify those consistencies and then find technologies to fill the gaps, which a lot of times is something like Brightpearl where you’re streamlining those inefficiencies and then able to figure out if the systems that you have in place in your tech stack are either helping you or hurting you. And making sure that obviously it’s the former and doing your research and your due diligence to find the thing that is really going to let you take your business to that next level without hopefully costing tons of money or tons of time and things like that.
Chloe Thomas:
I like the extra stats you’ve added in there about the 90% of consumers saying that reviews impact their buying decision. I think, as you said, we can all relate to, and I think it’s easy as a retailer to think of the reviews as being a box. You have said, “Oh, we’ve got reviews, brilliant.” Or to look at a review, a bad review and go, “Well, we’ll fix it for that customer and it’s dealt with.” Or to look at the reviews and go, “Oh look, we’ve got a trend of this. Maybe we should fix that.” But to forget the huge impact that reviews have on new customer acquisition.
Chloe Thomas:
If you’re not fixing these problems once you know by changing the systems and improving things, then you’re wasting time and money. But you’re also meaning you continue to get bad reviews coming back in, which means you continue to negatively have an impact on your potential new customers, which they are. They really are kind of, if you get it right and you got your systems right there, they’re a huge kind of almost like a turbo booster, I suppose on your customer retention and acquisition. But if not, then you’re kind of still pushing a car up a hill with square wheels, which is an analogy which doesn’t necessarily work guys, but we’ll roll with it.
Sara Arthrell:
You are, Chloe. I’m glad you mentioned that too because so often we talk about how systems in your tech stack can help generate positive reviews. But you’re right, there’s the flip side of that, which is it helping to mitigate bad reviews. And so knowing that each of those things go hand in hand. So, of course, I want to create a good customer experience so that people come to my site and leave me five star reviews. But we also know that folks are usually more likely to leave reviews when they’ve had a bad experience. And so it’s that much more important to avoid that, if possible.
Sara Arthrell:
Because this is, I think probably in all the reviews research that we did, the stat that was just wild is that when we polled those retailers, and we also did consumers as well in this report, those consumers, 60% of them said that they were put off from buying from a retailer by only one single negative reveal. That’s just insane. It takes one bad review to say, “Hey, I’m not going to purchase this product.” And it takes, I think, five negative reviews to just stop them in their tracks on average from buying. It’s like, what can I do to, of course, obviously get those five star reviews, but also I need to do whatever I can to avoid the bad ones because that has an exponential effect on my business for a long time.
Phill Kay:
That’s it, the power sentiment, isn’t it? It’s unbelievable.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah.
Phill Kay:
You’ve only got to upset one person. And the fallout from that is unbelievable. And it’s so much harder to actually earn and keep the good relationship, even in life, we know, don’t we? But in eCommerce, it’s absolutely no different.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, you’re right. And in this world of social media, it’s not just about going onto something like Trustpilot and leaving a bad review. They’re doing that, but they’re also telling their friends and their family, and their coworkers, and they’re putting it on their own Facebook and their own Instagram about what a miserable experience this was. And so, it’s just why as opposed to then trying to sort of do damage control, and pick up the pieces and fix it. Let’s just stop it from happening altogether.
Chloe Thomas:
And so I want to come back to something we were talking a little bit about earlier where you were saying that the kind of the first thing for someone who’s going to take this whole thing seriously, is to look at what trends that are in the reviews and start fixing those problems. I’m guessing, someone starts fixing the problems without wanting to put words in your mouth, but certainly, in my experience, it’s an awful lot easier to fix those problems if you have everything running through one system. And so you’re not trying to kind of patch different systems together whilst you’re doing this. Is that something you guys experience a lot? Is a lot of people come to you at the point where they’ve got a spreadsheet and then Dave in the warehouse has got a list and maybe Sheila on calls has got a tick list that she does and she’s the only person who can do returns. If Sheila ain’t in, we can’t process a return. Do you find a lot of retailers coming to you with those kind of disjointed problems and that’s what Brightpearl is solving for them?
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, you’re exactly right. And I remember sort of first getting into this industry and being almost surprised that in the year, we’re now in 2020 that there were still such manual processes that multimillion-dollar retailers were using to run their business and sort of how easy it was for us to come in and sort of flip that mentality and say, “Well, have you ever thought about putting a system in place to help automate these processes? And let’s just take a look at how much time you’re spending right now trying to manage returns when the one person who’s responsible for that isn’t in the office or she takes a vacation.” Let’s let her go enjoy herself a little bit.
Sara Arthrell:
And so it’s always interesting to go in, particularly when I go visit customers onsite to see, have them walk me through what their processes are and then come in and figure out how a system can help fill a gap. And even beyond sort of the spreadsheet or the manual aspect, you also run into situations where they have a pretty large tech stack, but each of those systems are incredibly disjointed so they don’t talk to each other. There’s no sort of integration that’s happening. A lot of times you’re having to log in and out of these systems, tens if not hundreds times a day to get the information that you need.
Sara Arthrell:
And so then it’s sort of the next level of conversation is, okay, how do we bridge these gaps within each other? How can we make your eCommerce site talk to Brightpearl and then talk to your shipping software? All that kind of stuff then really takes you to the next level because you’re, if you think about just the amount of time you spend logging in and out of a system every single day, if you’re able to eliminate that, your efficiencies go through the roof. And so it’s particularly fun to have those conversations. Not necessarily with sort of the higher level, the CEO, the CIO, the CTO, but the people who are on the floor doing this every single day and really trying to change their mentality and the look of excitement that they get when they say, “Oh my God, you just saved me an hour every single day. Thank you so much.”
Chloe Thomas:
And given we’re now very much talking about the sorts of things, sorts of ways even in which you solve problems for people, do you want to tell us a bit more about Brightpearl and how those who are interested can get in touch with you guys?
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, absolutely. By definition, Brightpearl is a true retail operations platform that one of my favourite parts about working for Brightpearl is it is built specifically for brands, retailers and wholesalers. And it’s all about automating the important but very time consuming, very manual back office operations. As I mentioned earlier, think about it in regards to the buy button. There’s at least 30 steps that happen between when a customer hits buy and when it actually ships. And a lot of the times those steps are very disjointed or they’re done manually and can get really messed up, especially as a business gets more complex.
Sara Arthrell:
Brightpearl comes in and does things like consolidates your orders across all your different channels while managing your inventory in real time for all those different channels. And since we’re fully integrated within the whole retail tech ecosystem, we have tons and tons of knowledge on what other software make up a retailer’s tech stack and how they all should connect with each other to automate that as much as possible. And all the research that I’ve mentioned today, the crazy stats that I threw out there, those can be found on our website at brightpearl.com and we are always highlighting those on our social networks as well. You can check us out there. LinkedIn @brightpearl and then Twitter and Facebook @brightpearlhq.
Phill Kay:
That is brilliant. Brightpearl is a company that’s close to my heart because I used to work at Brightpearl for a few years and it was fantastic to see how can we tie in the way you were talking about. I suppose the one thing I just wanted to really hammer home, if you like, really just from your perspective, is of course, we’re all software companies. We’re all trying to do the best we can for our customers. And so, if you were to explain to me or our listeners or retailers in general that are out there, why they would kind of speak to Brightpearl because of the expertise that you have in the marketplace? Because of course, there are so many different solutions out there. What would you, how would you kind of package up Brightpearl as really important reason why when you boil it down, they need to speak to Brightpearl? From all the experience you’ve got and all the hundreds of customers you’ve now got globally, how would you kind of boil that down?
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, that’s a really, really great question. I think there’s sort of two ways that I would answer it. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times throughout the episode today, there is tons of competition out there in the software retail world. Brightpearl is not the only one out there. And I think when I even was considering my career in coming to Brightpearl, as a product marketer, you really search for things that make your job and it being easy to sell and easy to market from a career standpoint. And the one thing that really drew me to Brightpearl was, and I realised immediately was the level of empathy that we have for our customers. This goes beyond what you see on our website and from a marketing standpoint, but never have I worked at a company where there is such a genuine motivation to help our customers succeed.
Sara Arthrell:
And it is from the very beginning of your sales process to you being a customer for 10 years. We are constantly trying to improve. We are on our own sort of internal channels talking about the stuff that we need to fix for our customers or the cool things that we’re doing for our customers. And it creates this environment that is very motivating. And I think when you look at sort of the tech stack world out there in general, there’s like I said, tons of stuff to choose from. But you need to find the company that has that level of empathy and particularly the level of expertise, which is my second point where we only work with retailers. That’s all that we do. There’s no other vertical, there’s no other medium that we’re focused on. Empathy is reiterated by the fact that every single day we’re there helping customers do what you’re trying to do.
Sara Arthrell:
And so it sort of combines the best of both worlds, this level of expertise with this level of empathy and creates a company that is designed to grow your business and we don’t succeed unless you succeed. And so it’s a fascinating place to work. It’s an incredibly interesting industry. It’s a very motivational place to be. And so I think it’s important for customers to sort of recognise beyond just what we do and the software itself, how we do it, and the services that accompany it. I think that’s all stuff that everybody needs to pay attention to. And I’m really proud at the end of the day to work for a company that focuses on that.
Phill Kay:
Oh, fantastic. Thanks for that.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, thank you.
Chloe Thomas:
Well, Sara, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been brilliant getting deep into some awesome stats. I do love a good stat, but also really exploring that area which for retailers it’s very easy I think to ignore sometimes what’s going on in the backend and what’s happening in the warehouse, what’s happening with customer service and the results of those reviews. I think we’ve already shone a light on it today and I hope we’ve helped a lot of you listeners out there. Sara, thank you so much for being on the show.
Sara Arthrell:
Yeah, thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. It was awesome.
Phill Kay:
Fantastic. Bye-bye.
Sara Arthrell:
Bye-bye.
Chloe Thomas:
Phil, that was our chat there with Sara. What an interesting, interesting series of things we talked about that I cannot actually quite believe how much we covered in just our one chat. What for you were the kind of the key takeaways?
Phill Kay:
I thought that it was very interesting actually that Brightpearl have kind of really thought about what they’re trying to do in terms of helping a retailer with a specific pain point and actually kind of doing the due dil if you like, to explain that actually a lot of the operational problems that can occur with a retailer are actually detrimenting customer lifetime value. I think that’s a very clever thing to do because if you go to retail and you’re talking about operational efficiency and hours saved and this kind of thing, that is obviously really important. But actually if you can link that back very strongly to the fact that actually if you don’t seriously consider this stuff, it’s not just about operational efficiency, it’s about you retaining your customers and making sure they come back and increase their customer lifetime value. All of a sudden you’ve got a much more powerful value proposition. I found that actual part of this really interesting.
Chloe Thomas:
Yeah, I think it’s so easy for people just to think, oh, the back office is the back office. But when you actually sit down and think about it, if you’re annoying customers, then you’re annoying someone who may give up on their order and want their money back so you’ve lost them. Or they might still place this order, but you’ve annoyed them enough they’re never going to place an order with you again. And you’re creating content because we’ve all got to get reviews. You’re creating content which is leading to future customers who don’t even know the customers that you’ve annoyed, to not buy from you because they’re seeing service was shocking. The product never arrived. The courier was awful. They took two months to process my returns payment. It’s these things which we think, oh, it’s a bit annoying, it’s a bit annoying, it’s a bit annoying, but actually it has such ramifications above and beyond the warehouse.
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. I just thought about something actually. I was on the train the other day and there was quite clearly quite well to do guy. Clearly had a bit of money. He was sat there and he was trying to get a return process over the phone to this company. I don’t know who the company was and he got just completely, aggressive actually, by the time it was like, “Your company is so difficult to deal with.” And the value of the item actually was about 1,500 quid.
Phill Kay:
And you can imagine if you shelled out 1,500 pound on something and it’s something you need to return and it’s not going that well, and they couldn’t find it and then they had other issues about. He was giving them the tracking reference a number of times. He says, “Your company is so difficult to deal with and I’m never going to deal with you again and I’m going to take this up with X, Y, and Z sort of body,” or whatever. And I was like, wow, I’ve just remembered actually, this is part and parcel isn’t it? And his reaction was like, wow, if you get that as a brand, that you haven’t got those processes stitched up, I’ve seen it firsthand what the fallout of that is.
Chloe Thomas:
Yes, and I think the other thing is if you’ve got those higher price points, consumers think you’ve got the margin to be good at this stuff. If it’s a 10 pound item and all you ship are 10 pound items, well they probably haven’t got a lot of margins for customer service that can be a bit further down the line. But 1,500 pound items, I expect some good customer service from that.
Phill Kay:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Chloe Thomas:
Thank you, Phill. And haven’t we all in our real lives seen the pain of bad customer experience? So obvious how it can then impact on future growth. We had some great stats and ideas and recommendations there, so make sure you head to segmentify.com/podcast where you can get your hands on all the links and resources mentioned in this episode, the eCommerce Growth Show, and a full transcript. That’s a written version of this whole episode. By that link, you will also find details of the whole eCommerce Growth Show series. Right now there’s only one left to be put live, so you’ve got five you can binge on.
Chloe Thomas:
In the final episode of this series, Phill and I will be joined by Tash Jones from SmartFreight with whom we will be talking more about post-purchase growth strategies. This time in the world of shipping and carrier management. Don’t miss it.