Joshua Chin 11:54
that’s, that’s good. I took down a bunch of notes. And I want to dive a little bit deeper into what we’ve just said. And I’m paraphrasing here, because I was just scribbling really quickly, you mentioned that every stage of your customers journey is an opportunity to create a brand evangelist. Yes. To paraphrase that, right. So I think that’s incredibly, incredibly accurate. And I can I think everyone can draw from a personal example of how good and experience or bad experience they’ve had with an econ brand online, and shopping online and how that reflects their impression on the brand. Most recently, I was shopping on I was actually browsing through Crocs. Crocs, yeah, it’s so ugly, but so comfortable. And it’s coming back. It’s a trend. Now, for some reason, but But yeah, so I was browsing through Crocs. And the discount code that was given to me via email wasn’t working anymore. For some reason, it was, it was like a 20% off code. I was basically at the checkout page, I was ready to key in my my credit card details and make a payment. But I couldn’t use my discount code. And it was given to me, I would have I would have bought anyways without a discount. But since that was given to me, and it wasn’t working. I just want to I was just gonna wait. So I basically sent a reply to email to the, to the their support team. And I, I honestly, I haven’t heard from them since I’ve actually sent two emails since then. Oh, what do you think? Is that that loss of sales as a result of events like this? Is that significant? And do you have like some kind of quantification or measurement around that?
GQ Fu 13:47
Well, that is actually a really good question. I can’t recall any stats offhand. But I would think that that is, you know, that that in itself, like you’ve already mentioned, the experience yourself, like how, how would that work? If you’re sending out promos that don’t work, that’s gonna ruin the experience like because like you said, there’s this expectation that I’m going to get this when you put I’m going to get this discount, but now I don’t that automatically sets a different level from your sets a different expectation, right? Like, you know, hey, I don’t actually want to buy that anymore. Because you know, you didn’t keep your promise as a brand in a way right and then aspect. What could be interesting here Actually, I wanted to expand on that because for some reason, some brands don’t like you know, they when they send out such marketing emails, these emails either go, you know, go unanswered, like you mentioned, or for some strange reason, some people use no replies which is like really weird. Like, you know, I have seen like, a few, just a few it’s not it’s not very common, but it does happen. And that is like the best opportunity for you to engage with that person right there and then someone who’s ready to purchase from you and so you know what, one of the things that we talked about was omni channel customer support, right? And so you know, if you’re working with, you’re operating on a different help desks that enable you to you know, channel that better. You, your marketing team does not have to be the one to respond. And that’s where customer service can come in. So that they can actually pick up on pick up on that and say, Hey, you know what, I saw that you have your cart there, I’m sorry that the codes not working. But you know what, I’ve already gone in and gone ahead and apply that 20% for you, please use that to purchase it. Now, if you had experienced that would that’d be something that would help you change your mind, you know,
Joshua Chin 15:22
bam, immediate conversion, and I’m a customer.
GQ Fu 15:25
There you go. There you go.
Joshua Chin 15:27
That’s, that’s the that’s the difference. Amazing. And you talked a little bit about reducing friction, and failed payments after friction as well. But it isn’t at, well, it isn’t necessarily the fault of the brand, or the business in the first place. It’s it’s kind of just a consumer having a bad credit card or just bounced purchase for whatever reason. How what what do you how do you think about that approach? In terms of from a brand’s perspective, why should they even care about getting that and recovered in the first place?
GQ Fu 16:06
Sure. So this is, I guess, like, you know, like, when we typically think about recovery, we think about cart abandonment. And so we know that there’s low hanging fruits that we could easily get back and you know, increase your sales as a result, this is same with fill payments as well. Now, this depends on of course, two things, whether it’s involuntary or voluntary churn, so we talked about involuntary, someone that might have forgotten about this, and they’re not necessarily getting the notification that, hey, you know, this, this, your payment didn’t go through. And you know, your subscription boxes do like whenever and like, if we don’t like, sometimes it gets automatically cancelled because or paused because they don’t get paid. But someone, but as a customer, maybe expecting that I never got that email somehow might have slipped out on my inbox, half a million emails in my inbox, or went to spam or whatever. And so if you’re able to cut through that noise via through text, be it through maybe a phone call, even some clients, some customers do appreciate that, and brands do, you know, kind of build that out? Not only with my experience be better, like be good, like, you know, I would know that, okay, cool that this, like my subscription box is going to come on time. But for the brand in that makes sense as well, because then you would be recovering otherwise lost revenue for one or two months. And that can make a big difference as a subscription based business because your your revenue would be affected and like, you know, how much how much money what’s your cash flow going to be like in laneway. Like, if you were to have just imagine, like a lot of hardware, however much you’re making now, and you’re experiencing 20% of bill payments, 30% 50%. Okay, well, 50 percents a little bit too much. So let’s just say 10% 20%, and you recover even 50% of that, that’s a lot. That’s a lot that comes back to you. Right?
Joshua Chin 17:44
It’s very meaningful. And with that, I have a kind of, so it is something that we care for at Chronos, as well. We think about creating automations, around recovery frameworks from a cart page, or at the product page, or even a payment payment part. What’s the difference? Or rather, what’s the added benefit than having a human behind that chat and that conversation, versus just an automation that’s run on email or text, for instance?
GQ Fu 18:18
Sure. So automation is really good to do at scale. And you know, for those that automatically level automatic automation, for those that respond to automation, well, and you’re ready, so you’d be getting back a lot of revenue or recovered sales, without the need of spending more, because you’re gonna have that done through software, but then you still have those that, you know, kind of fall through the cracks, right? You know, after repeated Dunning emails or repeated recovery emails, but people just don’t get it. But then today, you know, you were to get a person reaching out, like, you know, an actual print, like a name that you can put to the brain like a face even depending if you know, like, it was like Josh from Crocs, for example, right? Yeah. So there it kind of personalizes it humanizes the whole experience. And so you engage in that person and, you know, there is still the, I guess, 5050 view, when it comes to chatbots or automation, right, you know, you know that these emails are coming through, you know, like, it’s a mess and email when you reply, and then you get someone who’s actually talking to you at the end of it, that kind of builds that rapport with that brand. And your sorry, your bread builds a rapport with your customer as a result. And so people are more inclined to engage and they know that they will, if they were to ever hit up customer service for Crocs, for example. They will not just like get to a dead end but rather someone will respond to them and attend to them and I think it makes a helps a shopper understand that they’re all equally important versus just like hey, you know, you’re just someone that I’m sending mass marketing to. And when you have humans behind that, I think the really good part of that is for them to understand what the situation is, you know, because there are four the the standard use cases, those are already taken care of by automation, but today, maybe someone was wishes to purchase this but they had some concerns. For some questions that weren’t necessarily answered, that’s where humans steps in, do you know clarify those and move on with the sale? Right? Because otherwise it wouldn’t it would disappear.
Joshua Chin 20:10
Amazing, amazing. And I was thinking about just, you mentioned the scalability aspect of off of recovery processes, and just customer service as a whole. Now, when we think about turning customer service into profit center, that’s that’s one thing. But when we have humans involved, especially when I think about the brands that we work with, they often have a very difficult time hiring the right people, putting them right in the right seats, and then train them up to be sufficiently adequate and proficient in customer service. How do you how do you help in that process of scaling a customer service? team? for brands fast growing?
GQ Fu 20:58
Sure. So I think the one thing that we first look at is, well, we can take two scenarios, right, the first one is easy to kind of measure is holiday seasons, or Black Friday, Cyber Monday, those are like automatics that you kind of set out there. And you know, you do you do your best to project based on last year’s performance. But you know, like, we’ve seen brands that have double or triple their revenue in one year, right? Because last year was, you know, obviously very different for a lot of brands. And so you know, when you have that kind of projection, you just, you want to be able to scale that team up within the timeframe. And you have a little bit of preparation beforehand. So what we do is we usually find out with, like, figure out what our clients like, what does that look like, you know, how many, first of all, what sort? What sort of automation? What sort of, you know, what sort of tools can you put in place so that ideally, the agents do not have to take care of the very transactional inquiries, not because they’re not interested in having that conversation. But it just doesn’t make sense. When you have more people come through the site on that for that period of time. Then once it’s done, it’s figuring out okay, how much more team members how many more team members are needed to come on and, and think brands are not always very keen to bring on part timers? Because it’s not very easy to get like part timers who come on for, like, you know, for over two weeks, a month, and then call it a day, right? You know, usually, when you employ them, you have to take care of like, you know, there’s like the probation, period, etc, etc. part timers, also not always easy to find. And so that’s kind of where it’s an I guess it’s an outsourcing company, we are able to fill that gap because we already have people anyway. And so we’re able to like say, Hey, you know, what, if you need 10 people, 10 people tomorrow, we’re, well, within a week or tomorrow, we were able to, you know, have those agents ready and just start training. So like an example here was, there was a friend that we worked with. And I think we had a team of like two or four agents prior. And then during Shark Tank, they they went up, they went on Shark Tank and the episode aired, and that was like they experienced like, a massive increase in their traffic. And so we had to more or less scale the team up like 10 plus agents like pretty much within a week or less. And so we were able to, you know, tackle that volume as a result. So and again, they didn’t need it all the way. And after the 10 was done, you know, after a few weeks, we dropped it back down to two or four. So that’s, that’s where I guess it helps. And I guess we are a remote company, it helps a lot when we are able to tap into talent from all over the world, right? Because they if you’re very focused on on recruitment in a certain area, that’s good, but there are limitations, right. And so when we talk about, you know, converting customer service into a profit center, we think that outsourcing and hiring remote talents really plays a good part in that aspect, depending, of course, where the brand is based, because, you know, you’ll be able to hire great quality people and not necessarily having to, you know, fork out like, you know, like, a lot in training etc. Because that’s already taken care of by an outsourcing company, where you know, we have the the departments to build a training programs take care of that for you. And so we can scale the team as quickly as needed, because training is all taken care of by us recruitment, etc, etc. And so, as a brand, you know, you’ll be able to focus on scaling your brand, you’ll be able to focus on, you know, what’s the brand strategy, what’s your marketing strategy, right. And so, one thing that’s really interesting that that we noticed, as well as there are a lot more ecommerce brands that are outsourcing a lot of their different departments because they want to focus mainly on the product and brand. Whereas like, you know, for example, a brand will work with Chronos Agency, or LTVplus to take care of like email marketing, take care of customer service. And you know, because we are doing that at scale, and so, we’re able to share the expertise that we have with the brands and so they they’re able to benefit from that.
Joshua Chin 24:39
That’s amazing. And if you had one message that you can, that that you’re able to send to basically all ecommerce brands all across the world, what would that message be?
GQ Fu 24:55
The message would be take a look at a customer service today, are you you know, this is a very easy to win channel for you to generate not even just like more sales, it’s one thing when we’re talking about the longevity of your shoppers right? Take a look at your customer service, take a look and see, are you getting back to customers in time? You know, there are some customers where you know, your turnaround, like your turnaround time where your response, your first response time can fall somewhere between 24 hours to 48 hours, that’s automatically a big No, no, right? Because customers are waiting, they want an understand where their order is they have a question. So take a look at customer service today. Understand, you know, what are some of the gaps that you could easily fill either through, you know, working with, you know, maybe just implementing certain automations in place with the help desk that you have, maybe consider bringing all your communication channels into one. So you create a true omni channel customer experience that allows you to generate more sales and increase customer satisfaction.
Joshua Chin 25:59
Amazing. And if, if, if this was at the end of the year, right, like 31st, December 2021. Looking back at the year as a whole, what would what would what would you have achieved at LTVplus for you just for you to say this was a great year.
GQ Fu 26:27
For us to say this was a great year. Sure. So I would say that if we’re able to give more jobs to people like 4x, and what we have right now, I think that would be a huge achievement for us. Because you know, when we started this business, David and I, we The goal was to create as many jobs as possible in customer service. And I think Customer service is a it’s a it’s a role where you can learn and pick up over time. And this is one of the evergrowing positions that you can look for people all over the world. And as long as you have internet as long as you have the right technology, the right skill sets in the right languages, customer service, you either already have it or you can also learn if you start off in a junior role. So we want to really spread the love of remote work everywhere. And so for x and five x what we have today would be awesome to know that we’ve done we’ve done we’re good work to give people more work. Yeah.
Joshua Chin 27:19
Love that. Love that. And last final question. What are some of the what are some brands that you personally admire? That you feel do a great great job at customer success? And why if you could kind of elaborate on that?
GQ Fu 27:40
Sure. So we think about e commerce let me just think here well, none of them come to mind this is this is where I’m gonna say like it is like kind of dropping up but like I don’t do a lot of shopping. Just recently I run it I run a customer service as an e commerce but I don’t do a lot of shopping. minimalism a
Joshua Chin 28:04
free Okay, got it.
GQ Fu 28:06
Okay, let me let me think here, but no, I would love to, you can cut that part of I love to talk about customer service and customer success. Let me see what’s a good one here? Wow. It’s been a while. What was the one that left a deep impression on me? Well, none of them are coming to mind. I don’t know why that’s so strange.
Joshua Chin 28:30
Or, you know, what we could talk about? What are some of your current order some of the current brands that you that you’re working with that you feel are basically you help them bring bring customer success to? Because customer service to a new level that was there really beats out all the competition in a very significant way?
GQ Fu 28:52
Sure. So there’s there was one where we recently actually published this case study on our site, and that is if Pink Lily, and it’s been a real fantastic time working with them from what I understood. So we were able to get I think, like what what was really good here for us was when we worked with them, it was it was relatively easy and straightforward to get the training set up in place. We were able to stuff the right amount of team members there, but also bringing together you know, what are the best practices because they were, they’re operating out of a certain helpdesk, and we were able to support that and being because one of the things that we thrive on is to be experts in all the different help desks that we support, right? We’re not just going to say, okay, you know, like, our favorite phrase to use is, we pretty much know most help desks on the market. If we don’t, we will learn it and we’ll make sure that we become great experts at that. And so we were able to bring together you know, all the different sets of as we mentioned a bit of automations in place, helping them bring the best customer service experience. Not through, you know, highly skilled agents that are obviously very involved with fashion. But also the other aspect of that was to ensure that we were utilizing technology to the best that we can every step of the way. And even till now we’re looking at optimizing it right? So that they make them, they make the most out of customer service. And they can, obviously, as a result, reduce your costs and also generate more profit as a result. And so I think that was really helpful. And, you know, when we, when we were last year, there was like the immense growth especially at the end, q3 q4, for most brands, we were able to tackle them with the with a scalable solution, which I think was really helpful. And in managing and making customers happy.
Joshua Chin 30:44
Gotcha. And this case that he’s listed on your site,
GQ Fu 30:47
that is correct. Yeah, it’s
Joshua Chin 30:48
on it’s on the website. And all manual, you’re missing out the best part, you’ve generated over half a million dollars in revenue. With customer service. Yeah. For for them that that’s, that should be what you start the statement with. That’s the success, man. I mean, that’s incredible. And if you know, if you’re able to generate that much with a strong customer success team, that’s happy customers. And I know for a fact that happy customers mean, repeat purchases and happy business and ultimately, a long lasting one. Thank you so much for your time, GQ. That’s our time. And it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
GQ Fu 31:31
Yep, seeing here, Josh, thanks a lot for your time and always glad to be on the podcast. Yeah. Always have a chat. And also
Joshua Chin 31:37
before you before you go, if people are interested in contacting you or learning more about LTVplus, how should they reach out,
GQ Fu 31:45
up so you can reach out to me and GQ@ltvplus.com, or feel free to add me on LinkedIn. That’s GQ Fu. And they pretty much be able to find find me on LinkedIn there. So either email or LinkedIn, definitely happy to have a chat. And I think the most important thing here is that if you have some questions about customer service, feel free to hit me up anyway. I just love discussing that. Anyway, yeah.
Joshua Chin 32:06
And your shirt says, What is it say?
GQ Fu 32:09
Cx Nerd? There you go. Hashtag Cx Nerd. That’s right. Yeah.
Joshua Chin 32:14
GQ, thank you so much for your time.
GQ Fu 32:16
All right. Thanks, Josh.
Outro 32:20
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
