Why DTC founders cannot afford to ignore checkout issues, customer support and the post order customer experience
Dear DTC Founders,
I have a recommendation for you guys. This is based on my experiences as a customer ( I have tried lots of DTC brands. Often just to test them out), conversations with multiple founders and learnings from building CaratLane. I have said this many times. So putting it out here.
If you have an online presence ( website or app ), and if it’s an important channel for you, then PLEASE focus and fix the following things.
- Checkout – Look at everything which causes friction. For eg, In the age of OTPs, a password based checkout is an anachronism.
- Customer support – Don’t look at this as cost. Most people are asking questions because they dont know you and they expect instant replies. Even at night when online buying is quite high.
- Delivery / tracking – People want speed and predictability of delivery
- Reverse logistics / pick up and refund – Same as above.
What I have discovered is that many DTC businesses don’t have these pieces sorted and as a result customer experience is painful. Even customers who like the brand’s products and are coming back for a repeat purchase get very frustrated. They often end up buying from marketplaces or offline stores. The same experience is much superior on these marketplaces. It’s quite likely that the next time, the customer will go to the marketplace directly. I have done this many times myself and many founders have confirmed to me that this happens quite often in their business also.
So what is the downside ? Aren’t you still getting the business from the customer.
Many times yes. But you end up spending an extra commission unnecessarily. Additionally, there is a good chance of the customer getting tempted by an another brand once they go to an online or offline marketplace.
This isn’t the main issue though.
Remember that customer experience is an essential piece of brand building. And this bad expereince is a BIG negative for your brand.
Even this isn’t the biggest problem.
For a DTC brand, the MOST important channel is your own channel. Your own website or app or your store. This is where you have full control on the customer communication and customer journey. This is where you have the best opportunity to create love and loyalty for the brand. This is where you can collect customer data to create future opportunities for selling to this customers in the most efficient and effective manner.
So when you lose the opportunity to sell to an interested returning customer because of the above mentioned issues, you lose a great opportunity to create a LOYAL CUSTOMER.
A loyal customer is the most important asset of a consumer start up. Not only do they give you lots of business at very low marketing costs, they also help you acquire lots of new customers. Word of mouth is very hard to track digitally and doesn’t show up in marketing dashboards. But if you carefully study the journeys of your new buyers ( this requires interviews and wont show up in a survey by the way), you will find that there is often a gentle nudge from an existing customer somewhere in there.
So you lose the opportunity to engage directly, get customer data, build channel stickiness and repeat sales and eventually the chance to have word of mouth and brand love.
I cannot think of a DTC startup where this should not be a key priority. So I don’t see how one don’t invest in these areas.
This is very important for valuation also. Doing this right improves your customer experience scores, your repeat rates and your own channel growth. And trust me every consumer investor is looking at these three metrics.
Think about it.
