- [Narrator] You head to dumbdumbmattresses.com.
All your craving is a good night's sleep.
You can't find any products
in the store because the Navigation bar
and images are flying left and right at you.
You finally find the product
and it looks like a kid drew the product image.
It's a 3D render.
You have no idea what it's gonna look like.
How long's it gonna take to get delivered?
No idea. It says two to eight weeks.
Despite all of this, you purchase the product.
Three weeks pass and you get a random email
saying "We tried to deliver your mattress,"
but there was no heads up.
Finally, after waiting a week for redelivery,
an overweight fella named Jim, stinks of cigarettes,
comes and basically throws the mattress through your door.
Then you finds scuff marks that have come through
the plastic on your brand new mattress.
Now you're gonna have to contact customer service,
which can take two to eight weeks to even get a response.
You're so stressed from trying to organize this delivery,
you haven't had a good night's sleep in so long
and you start making a lot of mistakes at work.
Then you end up getting fired
because you make so many mistakes.
You haven't had a good night's sleep in ages
and your partner leaves you.
Now compare this to the other situation.
You order off this beautiful website with crisp imagery.
The product comes within four hours.
You've got 120 days for free sleep trial
with free returns, no questions asked.
You're so rested that you get a job promotion.
Congratulations, you are now rich.
This is because this brand has an amazing customer service.
Today we're gonna talk about one
of the biggest reasons that businesses fail.
This can be the difference between having a brand
that never takes off and a billion dollar brand.
Yes, product, team, market timing, funding.
These are all important things,
but if you don't have these one thing, your days unnumbered.
I'm talking about customer service, before you switch off,
this one video can change your life completely,
can change any business and transform its trajectory.
Today we're gonna cover three main things,
why customer service is important,
the main mistakes that brands make,
the exact hacks that we did at the Oodie
that gave us over 3 million happy customers,
but first, we're gonna go over some of our most crazy
customer service tickets that we've received to see
if we can get any lessons for the video.
Are you stupid, guys?
Question mark. A million question marks.
This is how tense customer service can get.
Stop sending me (beep) (beep) (beep).
Sophie right up here, her destroyed (beep).
It's like, you don't want business from me.
(dramatic music) On the 4th of June,
give me a (beep) Oodie, (beep).
(Host laughing)
So let's get into the actual substance of today's video.
Customers are expecting four main things from brands.
They're expecting an awesome delivery time.
They want incredible product quality.
They want fast and reliable communication
and then they want the best possible price.
If you nail these four pillars of customer service,
you are going to be an amazing brand.
Let's quickly touch on these four main pillars
starting with the trillion dollar elephant in the room.
Amazon product pages convert at 15%.
Compare this to Shopify pages,
which can convert from one to 5%.
The reason behind this is because Amazon is so reliable,
customers are so used to their incredible delivery time.
It's like Jeff Bezos is hand delivering these products
like a jacked Santa climbing down the chimney,
throwing the boxes at children.
That got so aggressive so quickly.
How did- (all laughing)
Customers have become so accustomed
to this reliable delivery time that you
as a brand owner doing direct to consumer need to understand
and compete with in terms of the consumer's expectations.
The second thing is price.
This can be a sensitive conversation topic
for businesses because not all products are made equal.
Just like iPhone and Android and Elon Musk
and fake Elon Musk, I've always ascribed to the mentality
that the Oodie needed to be a premium product.
I thought that people would want to invest in their comfort,
understanding that they have thousands
of hours in their comfort clothing.
This is especially tough when certain knockoff brands
come in and they're basically selling the product
for less than we can buy it for because they use
far lower quality materials and much less of it.
When it comes to price and customer expectations,
you just need to be very clear about communicating
the value that your product provides.
For example, we say that Oodie is longer
than a lot of these competitors, which they are.
One great example of a customer first approach
to pricing is Cost Plus drugs by Mark Cuban.
On his website, you can see how much the product cost him
and then his exact markup, which is around 15%
that he's charging to his customers.
This allows the customer to feel very confident
they've got the best possible price for the product.
The third thing customers really want is just
great product quality, and I don't just mean
that it doesn't fall apart the day after you un-box it.
It needs to perform the exact function
that you are advertising on your website
and in your Facebook ads.
This is one of the main problems with drop shippers.
The product initially works and then,
over time factories keep reducing the quality
until the product becomes so poor that it actually
doesn't solve the initial thing that it was built for.
And the fourth pillar can be summarized very well
in a saying, an email a day keeps the negative reviews away.
Customers want a personalize response
in a robotic timeframe, you should be aiming
for a 24 to 48 hour response time.
Yes, even on weekends.
This can be very tricky for a smaller business
but we're gonna get into the hacks in just a second.
While the expectations around a fast response time is there,
it is still expected that you have a quality response
that solves a person's issues.
Some brands subscribe to the mentality
that quality is more important and investing
in customer service is important such as Zappos.
Record at Zappos is 10 hours a customer service agent
stayed on the phone with a customer,
helped her exchange her product.
Talked about growing up in New York, even helped her
find new shoes to spend her exchanged credit on.
So let me explain why customer service
is the main reason that businesses fail.
A Forbes survey showed that 96% of customers will
change brands if they have a negative customer experience.
This brings me to my main point.
Customer service creates retention.
The elusive thing that all business is chasing,
retention is the ability to bring back customers
to purchase the same or a different
product offering of your business.
Think Apple, once you've got the iPhone,
you're not gonna be even looking at Android ads.
You're gonna buy subscriptions, apps,
everything in their ecosystem.
All of the best direct to consumer
e-commerce brands such as Hero Cosmetics,
Gym Shark, Athletic Greens, they have amazing retention.
Customers keep coming back 'cause they
have a great customer service and a great product.
So how do we do that?
Let's get into my customer service hacks.
The first one is using automation.
Now, when we first started, we're getting,
you know, 10 emails a week.
Now we get about 50,000 customer service emails a month.
Using automation is a great way to reduce costs
and the amount of agents that you need.
Now, this is impossible unless you have a great platform.
As you guys know, I will never promote a product
that I'm not extremely passionate about,
but Gorgias has been one of the biggest
money savers that the Oodie has ever had.
We initially started using Zendesk.
The interface was clunky and the efficiency was not there.
Upon migrating over to Gorgias, we were able to get
so many more tickets done, it was absolutely crazy.
This is largely thanks to how you can
tag tickets, set up these views,
and then easily apply automation to that.
Let's say a customer is asking,
"Where is my order?"
On Monday, we get a lot of those emails.
You can easily apply a filter and a view
and get all of those emails compiled into one view.
The customer service agent can verify
that it's all correct because remember,
you want a quality response and then they can just
click Send, speeding up the process dramatically.
If you're a new brand and you're starting
to get a lot of customer service responses,
you definitely should try Gorgias.
I've asked them for an affiliate link.
It's down in the description below.
I also recommend Gorgias if you're using
any other provider, trust me it will speed you up.
The second hack that I love is incorporating
your customer service into your marketing.
Let's say you want to invest
in customer service like Domino's did in 1973.
At the time, the industry took
over 60 minutes to deliver a pizza.
They invested heavily in their operations,
allowing them to deliver most pizzas under 30 minutes.
They came up with a marketing slogan,
your pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
If not, you'll get your pizza free.
This took off, because think about it.
You can either wait 60 minutes for your pizza
or you can get a free pizza or really, really fast delivery.
It's a no-brainer, for e-commerce,
you can do premium delivery services
such as Koala mattresses.
They did that four hour delivery
for their mattresses and called it out
across their marketing, differentiate themselves.
This brings us to hack number three
and I see a lot of brands get this wrong.
It's about how you are requesting reviews.
A lot of people will just apply the automatic template
of their review platform such as Yotpo
and send requests to customers.
This is not what you should do.
You should create a custom email in your Klaviyo
or any email provider's automation that gets sent
14 days after the product is shipped.
You can then determine how much
of that email goes to certain platforms.
You can have 50% pushing to Trustpilot.
You can have another 50% going to your website
or even something like product review or Facebook reviews.
We prefer to get reviews on platforms
that people trust rather than our website.
These come up high in the search engine
when people search the Oodie reviews,
these websites are generally at the top.
While you can incentivize to leave a review overall
I believe it's illegal to incentivize a five star review.
Make sure with any review request email,
you're incentivizing disgruntled customers
that haven't had a good experience to actually
voice their concern in the email thread
so that you can solve it
and turn an angry customer into a happy customer.
Every angry customer is an opportunity
to make a loyal customer for life.
Hack number four is around surveying, non purchasing cohorts
or cohorts that didn't purchase the second time.
To do this, you can use Klaviyo.
You can build a list of customers that went to your website,
subscribe to the email list and didn't purchase.
Alternatively, you can build a list of people
that purchased once but never came back.
These kind of cohorts that you really need
to listen to so you can get better attention.
Hack number five. Now this is a common question.
Should I use Live Chat or not?
We do use live chat when our ticket count isn't too bad.
Remember, we're trying to aim
for 24 to 48 hour first response time.
If we have far lower than that,
we are gonna set up live chat on our website.
Gorgias is definitely the best live chat provider
that we've used because all of the live chats
and email tickets will all be in the one place.
The main mistake I see with Live Chat is that people have it
on the website, but nobody's actually manning it,
meaning someone asks a question there,
but they don't get responded to in the same email amount
of time, which could be two to three days.
You want an instant response with live chat.
Hack number six is actually setting up
self-service within that live chat.
Again, an amazing Gorgias feature.
Customers can easily request a discount code
or ask what their tracking number is in this live chat
and Gorgias will automate the reply reducing the amount
of customer service agents you need.
The seventh customer service hack is for
that founder that feels a little bit disconnected
on what their customers actually want.
This is a great habit to get into and lots of big CEOs
do this, is they actually do the job for a day,
get into your customer service portal
and answer some tickets yourself.
You're gonna learn things
that your customers are frustrated at.
You're gonna learn how to improve your product and service.
You're even gonna learn how to talk
to your customer service team a little bit better.
Hack number eight is similar to a parachute seller
offering free returns if it doesn't open.
Don't offer things to customers
that just don't matter, trying to trick them.
A good example of this is offering free returns
from another country where it costs more to return
the product than it actually did to buy the product.
Obviously, the customer is never going to do that.
You need to clearly explain that information
to not trick the customer.
Hack number nine is using offshore agents when applicable.
Now, there's a common misconception
that if you use international customer service teams,
it's gonna be way, way cheaper.
While this can be the case, it can be a lot
more training and it takes a lot of time
to build these international customer service teams.
My experience that is if you want really fast
and efficient customer service, you can train people locally
and get a very similar cost per ticket.
Where international customer service agents
are great to have on is very, very simple questions
and also the work days where existing agents
such as Australian staff have public holidays
or something like that.
If you like today's episode,
don't forget to like and subscribe.
If you'll feel like you're struggling with your business,
make sure you go watch our "Million Dollar Brand" series
where I build a brand from absolute scratch.
If you're feeling really lost,
you can also join our mentorship as well.
I'll leave a link to the description.
Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)