Inside OLLY’s Digital Strategy: Jennifer Peters on Using Martech and AI to Enhance the Customer Experience

Speaker A: Welcome to CX Champions, an unscripted masterclass on how you can stand out, think differently, and reimagine what a customer experience could look like in a digital first world.

Speaker B: This podcast is brought to you by hgs. Uh, HGS is a digital customer experience leader dedicated to delivering winning customer interactions at scale that are prompt, personal and positive. We continuously transform, optimize and grow enterprises to exceed ever rising customer expectations. HTS provides our clients with the right talent and technologies needed to champion every moment. Learn more at hgs.

Speaker C: Um, cx. Hello and welcome to CX Champions. My name is Meredith Gooderham and today

Speaker B: I'm delighted to chat with the director

Speaker C: of DTC, MarTech and digital compliance at Olli, Jennifer Peters. Jennifer has deep expertise in E commerce and Martech with extensive experience across marketing, technology and business development.

Speaker B: At Ollie, she champions the fusion of

Speaker C: technology and marketing for top notch digital. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Speaker C: So excited to get into it today and chat with you a little bit. I want to first call out something that you've said before, which is the fusion of technology and marketing is pivotal in crafting exceptional digital customer experiences. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit for us.

Speaker A: I would love to. I can start by saying that I come from the brick and mortar world. I spent 13 years at Barnes and Noble putting books in people's hands. So when I think about the customer experience, that's kind of my baseline is what happens when you walk into a store, what happens when you ask for help, what happens when you're looking for something and you can't find it? Or what happens when you're browsing and you're not sure where to start? All of those things translate directly into the digital experience. They just look a little bit different. So when I think about, you know, the technology piece and the marketing piece and how they have to work together, that's kind of my baseline and that's sort of where, where I start. Everything we do in the digital space is trying to replicate that in store experience, even if it's feels a little bit separated from that at this point. But ultimately, all of us as retailers, our, uh, goal is to put a product in a customer's hand that they want. That solves a problem for them. So it really starts with how do you get the customer in the store? How do you get the customer to browse the right section? How do you get the customer to ask the right question? How do you answer the question? How do you make sure Your employees have the answers to the question, and all those translate directly over into, like, website analytics, understanding customer behavior as they navigate your site. What does your checkout experience look like? Are there obstacles? How does your search work? Does your web search work well? Does it fix misspellings? Does it sort of anticipate where customers are going with their question? So for me, that is really the goal is to take the tools that we have in the digital space and rebuild those around the customer experience, but in a different world, in the digital world instead of the brick and mortar world.

Speaker C: Amazing. And you may have already touched on this a little bit, but how has your background. Cause you have a background in marketing and E commerce. So how has that shaped how you think about customer experience?

Speaker A: I've been in the business for a long time. Like I said, I did spend 13 years in traditional brick and mortar, which I think has turned out to be a huge advantage for me as, uh, you know, many people working in E commerce these days, you know, never worked in a store. And we're able to really unpack where the obstacles are to browse, to merchandising, and to thinking through the customer journey. We do it in the digital space, but you do it in the. In the physical space too. So for me, that has ended up helping me understand more where the gaps are and where. Where the customers can fall off or where the customer might get frustrated and decide to walk out the door. But being in different spaces in the digital space, I think is really helpful too. I mean, I spent years selling Christian church supplies, and that was interesting. Different, wildly different demographics than the space that I'm in now. Every universe in E commerce is different, but in. In a lot of ways the same. So for me, it's taking those learnings that you gather over those years and figuring out how to update those and apply those to the space that you're in now.

Speaker C: And then when I think about Ollie, I think of, like, vitamins and things like that. And I know when we sort of chatted earlier, part of that is like educating folks on the benefits of Olli products. So how much of your work now is educational? Whether that be like educating customers about the benefits of vitamins or. Or also educating between marketing and sales.

Speaker A: That's such a great question. Most people know what vitamins do in, um, a very general sense. However, there are times where we introduce new products that need a lot more context and they need a lot more explanation. Last year, we launched a new product line of Adaptogens. And Adaptogens is a word that can be interpreted different ways. In fact, I didn't understand it fully when we started working in that space. I kind of thought that meant that was like the equivalent of like functional mushrooms or something like that. I thought it was just. That's what it was. But the, the category of adaptogens is, is pretty big and complex and interesting. But that was definitely a new angle for us. We're known for selling really tasty, wonderful, great gummies, gummy vitamins that's kind of like our bread and butter. And the adaptogen space, it's capsule based. You have to take it every day over a period of time to see results. So it isn't like you take a sleep gummy and then you're sleepy and you go to sleep. It's definitely a different approach to solving a customer problem than the approach that we've taken in the past. So I think in that case where we are bringing something really new to the table, especially new in the space, in the supplement space, it does require a lot more education. And so when we build out campaigns around product lines or product launches that fall into that category, there's way more content that we create. So there's more video, there are more emails. You know, it's almost like a drip campaign of information to educate people on what these can do for you, how they can make your life better, how they can make you feel better, how they can make you more impactful, how they can help you sleep better. So there's definitely a huge component of education. There's, I think there are some products that are obvious, I think in the, in the way we name our products alone. It's like this is for gut health, this is, this is for your brain, this is for sleep, this is for beauty. Most of them are pretty straightforward. But I think when you do get into this space like in Adaptogens or you get into like women's sexual wellness or men's sexual wellness, it's definitely a uh, different context that you have to make sure that you've covered completely in order for the customer to really understand the benefits.

Speaker C: And then over. We can talk about both just at Ollie and in your career overall. But what sort of trends in customer experience and preferences have emerged in the digital customer experience?

Speaker A: It's customer experience space has changed so much in, even in the last three to four years. One of the brands I worked at the church supply company, we had a huge, we had a call center. It was a huge call center. And they did, you know, incoming calls and uh, an outbound calls. So they were doing outbound sales as well as taking customer calls. And that's like such an old school model. Now when I think about it, like it's kind of mind blowing that I ever even saw that happen in a real business because now everything is, everything is so much more sleek and so much more like efficient. And you think about all the ways that AI kind of plays into chatbots. And you know, we use a concierge service on our site which like staffed with a combination of AI and real people. So I think there's a lot of like new ways that customers are getting their questions answered that are just as effective as like the very traditional call center. But I'm also seeing like huge amounts of development in the space of like CX software. Like you used to just like literally was just Zendesk. That was it, that was it. It was the only choice. And if you wanted to have a live chat bot, you had to use Zendesk. And now there's just, there's so many options, there's so many choices, there's so much technology and R and D going into software like that. It's really exciting because anytime I feel like we're investing in the customer's journey and the customer's experience, that's the right place to invest. So seeing how many new challenger SaaS companies are in that space, I think is really exciting because that competition is driving everybody to up their game in terms of what kind of service we can provide to customers. Like how that gets automated, how that gets routed, how does that get to the right, you know, resolution, source, whether it's a human being, whether it's a ChatGPT bot, whether it's, you know, maybe somebody, uh, on concierge, whatever it is, whether it's email, all of those things now are coming together. Whereas there used to be like one path and now there are multiple paths. And that's, I think that's really exciting because customers are getting their questions answered much faster than they ever have before.

Speaker C: And you mentioned that the concierge is sort of AI equipped. It's doing part of that, that role. Is there do you find like a balance between like that automation, the AI part and the human interaction? Like how do you strike that balance?

Speaker A: We actually, the service that we use, the reason we chose them is for that very reason. There's so many things out there you can plug in that are just like, we're going to just AI this thing to death. And that's what we didn't want, especially because we are in the supplement space in particular, where we certainly don't want an AI tool misunderstanding claims or misunderstanding what we can and cannot say. So for us there's kind of this, there's boundaries around what kind of answers can be generated by an AI tool and then there's boundaries around what goes to a human being. And then even further, there are boundaries around what comes directly back to us to resolve. Like anything that's like safety related or you know, like anything like that. Of course, like we're going to immediately handle that. Like we're not going to let an AI bot handle something like that. So I think the choice of the partner that we use that really was sort of a defining element of the way they could workflow those types of inquiries. Like they really could quickly put them in one of those buckets. You know, if it's somebody who's just messaging in, like, I want to know when my order is going to get here. Like that obviously doesn't require the same kind of intervention as like I can't sleep and I don't know which sleep gummy I should take. You know, like that requires a lot more subtlety and understanding and probably follow up questions and context and those we want to keep in the space of humans where we can, we can provide the right context, we can read the room and understand how to answer the question. The best way for the customer.

Speaker C: Is there anything else you want to add about sort of like triaging the website for performance to make for a smoother cx?

Speaker A: I would say one of our biggest and best tools in our arsenal is Content Square and we use it to understand what customers are doing on the site. And without it, there's a lot of blind spots. I mean, there's some things you can assume, there's some things you can figure out. But not only does it help us understand where customers are breaking down, where they might be abandoning or they might be bouncing, where they might be experiencing frustration or a blockage to conversion, those things are really important and those are kind of like the bread and butter of what Content Square does. And it's amazing. I think the next level of that is also understanding how to optimize those things. Not even just to like fix the things that are broken and identify the things that are broken, but also like, how do you take what you have and make sure it's the best that you can have. So we do use Content Square to really understand like what do customers do on this page? What do they look at? What do they not look at and what things on this page could have performed better if they were in a different place? And that, that for us is like, the key to the optimization is like, did we do the best we could do when we built this landing page? Because what we're seeing here is like, that there could be some tweaks here that could make it better. And for us, that is like a little bit beyond the triage of like, oh, man, this is really broken to, like, how can we just make sure this is the best we can put out here? And that, uh, even if we thought the previous version was beautiful and lovely, and we just thought it was amazing, there could be something they're missing from the customer's perspective that we overlooked. And that's what we're always looking for. And that's what Content Square helps us find those gaps and those places where maybe we made the wrong choice or maybe we prioritized the wrong piece of content. And like the other things customers find more useful than the things we thought were useful. And that, that is a huge, huge help.

Speaker C: I'm sure there are times where you're like, really? Like, I didn't even see this coming. Or like, we thought this was great.

Speaker A: And, um, then you're like, no, that can't be. But at the end of the day, data's data, right? And it's always hard to, I think, especially when you're looking at design, which is like an art form, right? Like, it's beautiful, you want it to be beautiful. Sometimes beautiful doesn't drive conversions. Sometimes customers just want clear and they want clean, and they want to understand exactly what to do when they hit that page. And sometimes that isn't beautiful. And that can, you know, that can be really challenging, I think, sometimes to partner with other teams. The business where they're like, we just wanted to make the most beautiful thing we could make. And then, you know, you're kind of coming back with this data around. Like they just wanted to put an arrow there. Like they just needed to know, like, we needed something that just said, click here. That's all we needed. So that's always a hard conversation to have. But at the end of the day, when you have data, you, nobody, uh, can really say anything about it. Like, you're either data driven brand or you're not. And sometimes it's not. Doesn't always work out the way you think it will or you want it to.

Speaker C: So you mentioned, like, looking at data. What sort of data, what sort of metrics are you using to measure that experience?

Speaker A: I would say, first of all, like, we're supplement brands, so subscriptions are our bread and butter for us. That churn rate around subscriptions and active subscription rate is a business critical for us. Like, we always need to continue to grow and nurture our subscription program. That is priority number one. You drive subscriptions, you drive every KPI that you have. So that's always a priority for us. In terms of like customer satisfaction and customer happiness, I think there are a lot of different ways to do that. And the first being like, customers vote with their wallets, so. And their behavior. So that I think is. Is a really important piece of like, even if you do surveys and you ask customers, do you like this? Do you like this? It doesn't necessarily, like, they might not even know that that's not what they're actually going to do in the moment when it's time to do something. So we always look at behavior first and results first to understand, like, even if a customer said, oh man, I just want a sleep supplement that doesn't have melatonin in it, then we create one that doesn't have melatonin in it. And then literally nobody wants to buy it. Like, that is, you know, there's a misalignment there and kind of like what customers say they want versus what they actually want. And that happens sometimes. And that's. I think it's part of human nature. So that I think is probably the first and foremost most important thing for us is like, what are customers doing and what are they buying? Ultimately, at the end of the day, churn rate critical for us in the subscription space. You know, we do a lot of like, customer satisfaction surveys, that type of thing. Obviously we use like customer service software, so we have understanding, you know, melt rate. So like our products melt. Not all of them, but some of our gummies melt. So that is always like a. An important thing to understand is like, what's our melt rate look like?

Speaker C: I never thought about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's very challenging, you know, when it's really hot too. It doesn't matter how many cold packs you put in there, how many fancy, expensive foil line boxes you buy. There's sometimes it's just not going to make it, you know, to Arizona in September, you know, so, you know, it's always a fight to kind of balance that. Like, we want to ship you product, but we also don't want it to get to you in one melted blob. So. But it's also very expensive to ship, cold ship. So, you know, I think there's definitely times we think about seasonality and how to optimize around product type and different times of year. You know, in the summer we definitely do more of a merchandising emphasis on our non meltables, whereas like in the cooler months, you know, it's kind of like all gummies all the time. So I think you have to kind of consider that in your product mix too to sort of balance that profitability as well. Other KPIs, I would say for customer satisfaction, I mean, there's not anything wildly unusual there. I mean, we do post purchase surveys, you know, we obviously monitor, we do social listening, we do a lot of product sentiment research. We have a great tool that helps us understand product sentiment using like Amazon reviews and other product reviews. And that's been great too. But again, those are only as good as the feedback that you get. So, you know, I mean, people who write reviews are not necessarily everybody. They're the people who are motivated to write reviews. So you kind of have to factor that into and again, balance that out with like, but did they buy it? But did they subscribe to it in order to kind of paint like the full picture of what customers do?

Speaker C: Hmm, this might be a silly question. You mentioned a lot of all these businesses subscription based and I feel like there's kind of because they're consumables, right? Like there's a period where you run out and it's like, wouldn't you want to buy more? But like, if, if someone doesn't have a subscription, how do you trigger repurchasing otherwise?

Speaker A: I'm so glad you asked that. You can't have a conversation without talking about AI, right? Like you can't in this day and age. We don't use AI, unlike the front end. Again, we're highly regulated. Like, we're not using it to write product descriptions, we're not using it to write ads or make images or anything like that. But where it's really awesome for us is on the back end. And part of that is around product replenishment and not everyone is going to subscribe. And that's something like, you know, you kind of have to just accept the fact that not everyone's going to subscribe to a product, especially if it's the first time that they've purchased it. They may want to take it for 30 days to understand like, does this work? Does it do anything? Whatever. How do I feel? So we use a tool, it's called Black Crow AI and it sits in the background and Understands by product what the replenishment cycles are for those individual products. A lot of our products are daily use. So if, you know, if you take a multivitamin, you take it every day. If you buy a bottle of Women's Multi, like I know how many servings are in that. So like that one's easy, that one's like a slam dunk. Like we know exactly when to message you and be like, hey, we know you're gonna run out in 10 days, it's time to repurchase. I just wanted to let you know, like that one's easy. Some of the others are a little more challenging where they're like more as needed. So like sleep and like maybe gut health, like probiotics. We've got a fiber supplement, we've got some immunity stuff that you don't necessarily take every day. But what their machine does, it understands like on a, in a broad sense, what is the replenishment? What's the average replenishment cycle for this customer or for this product? And therefore then when is the window that we message the customer and say like, hey, we think it's time for you to repurchase, we think you're almost out of whatever it is. So that has been hugely helpful for us. And just getting that gap, like that gap group of customers that you know, aren't one time buyers, but they're not subscribers or somewhere in the middle. And then we also can remarket back to that group of customers and be like, you know, we know you repurchase, we messaged you, we saw that you repurchase. Like, wouldn't you really like to save 15% by just subscribing? Like we think this could really benefit you. So it gives us a little bit more context to kind of try to close that subscription to at the end of the day. Like, we know you're clicking, we know you're buying. Just subscribe, you'll never have to think about it again.

Speaker C: I knew too that I often actually have Ollie Women's Daily in the bathroom right now. And I love them. Some at some point I'm like, there's almost too delicious for vitamins, you know what I mean? Like there's gotta be some like line where it's like, you know, this becomes too delicious, you're gonna want to eat more than more than your dose, you know, versus like they need to look a little healthy, you know. I noticed you took the sparkly sugar off them, which is fine.

Speaker A: Uh, they ask for that.

Speaker C: I thought that was so funny, but I Know, for me, it's like, I don't have a subscription, but I often buy when I see it in store. And it's literally like everywhere. I love that they're easy to find. And I know that there's like a big presence both online and in brick and mortar stores. Like, how do you marry the online experience with the offline experience?

Speaker A: If I could answer that question, I would solve the hu. Biggest CPG problem in the world. Uh, it's really, it's a really hard problem. It really is. Especially when you're in so many channels, when, you know, in the digital world you can figure out almost anything. You can measure everything, you can kind of understand acquisition and balance and all of these things. When you try to take that kind of data set and mesh it up with like in store behaviors, it's like two different universes and two different languages in trying to match, mash them together. And you're right, we are in every grocery, you know, every Target, every Walmart, every drugstore. And all of those retailers measure their customers differently and track their customers differently. So it's like Walgreens might not have your email address. So, like, there's no way we'll ever know that that's you. And that is. I think that's a huge challenge right there. That's sitting there waiting for somebody to come solve. I don't know that it's an easy solution, but identity resolution is something I feel like comes up all the time, where we're constantly trying to even understand. Is this even the same person? I've heard some cool things about in store tech and understanding behavior in store. And so I'm hearing conversations around. I was just at the lead in New York two weeks ago and there were a lot of conversations around. Like, what brick and mortar stores are using surveillance cameras for now is more behavioral than it is, like loss prevention. Like, that's pretty cool to like, understand how long someone might stand in an aisle and look at your product and your competitor's product and how many, how many times they pick it up, how many times they put it back. Like, that's great data. Like, that's cool. And to think about a way where you could automate that kind of data and like build in like AI driven analysis around that behavior. Like, that is so cool. I don't know how close we are to that, but being able to understand that even. But then at the same time, even if you do understand that, it's still hard to take that and like, take this digital piece and like, Put them together. It's still really are. I will say one of the biggest places where we've dug into this is around like when people cancel subscriptions. So we have quite a bit of investment around understanding why someone will cancel a subscription. Like number one reason people cancel subscriptions is because they have too much product. Like that's widely known in the space. And so we can kind of assume like that's probably half people. But for us, I think one of the questions that we started asking that is really important. We started asking this a couple years ago is, are you buying Ollie somewhere else? Is it Amazon? Is it Target? Is it Walmart? Is it Target. Com? Is it walmart.com just to try to get a little bit more granular around. Like is this really what we would call a churned customer or are they just buying it at Publix now? Because that's great. Like we don't want to think about that customer as a lapsed customer because they're not. But at the same time it's really hard to take that and build like a scalable data set with that information and kind of put it together into like a cohesive story that can happen over time. But at the same time, at least we can ask the question and understand, did we lose you as a subscriber because of this? Because, oh, this product, Love and Libido used to not be sold in your area, but Walmart just added it to their selection and now you can buy it at the store. And that's another thing that happens is like, as our selections get bigger across the country and different retailers, that obviously impacts dtc. Whereas like, we used to be the only place you could buy Love in Livido and Happy Hoo ha. But now Walmart stocks it in stores where it didn't stock before, so now customers are able to buy it there. And again, it's not a lapsed customer. It's really understanding just like there's a preference around buying it in store. I can't wait till somebody comes along with a way to solve that problem. That's going to be the best. But for right now, it's just sort of a question mark.

Speaker C: I want to sort of back up a little bit and talk about just in general, what you think about as like an amazing digital customer experience. Like, what does that look like? What does that feel like? What does that like overall?

Speaker A: Oh, gosh. I mean, I, uh, feel like everybody uses Chewy as an example, but they just do it better than anybody else. Chewy is a company that does they sell pet supplies, dog food, you know, dog toys, everything pet related. They're very customer centric to the point where it doesn't feel like it's too much, but it feels like it's hard to like for from the outside looking in, it feels like, how are you going to scale that? Like, how is that scalable? However, you know when you have to call them and say like, I've heard so many stories like this and this happened to me myself recently where I had like a, an auto reorder for something for my dog that I forgot and he died in December and I was just like, oh, I forgot to cancel this. The sucks. And you know, you call them and you're like, I need to cancel this. You know, I forgot that it existed. And you know, my dog passed away. And you know they send you a handwritten note, they send you flowers. I mean these are people that like really love animals. And so when you're a customer of a company like that and you love animals and you kind of interact with these people who clearly do also, like, it really has a lot of meaning and you know, it definitely drives you back there too because you feel like these people understand me, they understand my lifestyle and what I need and the things that are important to me are also important to them. Another one that's like less dramatic and this is I think kind of cool. In these recent years there's two companies, Zenny and I buy direct. We're like, you go and you just put in your own subscription for eyeglasses, sunglasses, whatever. And it just feels like, I think the thing I love about it is that that's always been such an intensive in person experience, right? To like, you go, you get an eye exam, you go, you try on 20 pairs of glasses with the lady and you know, like takes forever. And it's just, it's like so much. But to be able to just like do it yourself is so cool. And also the prices are very cool, also very cool. But it's like there's no insurance, there's nothing. It's just like you're just, it's transactional. But it's so, so much taking this really complicated transaction and somehow making it super easy and organized in the way that like they understand there might be multiple people in your family with different eyeglass prescriptions. So we're going to make sure everybody has their own, you know, little tab saved with their own prescriptions in here. So when you reorder for your kids because they lost their glasses for the 10th time. Like you just kind of go back in there and hit reorder. So I think I love IBuyDirect. I think it's really cool. And I have kids and they break glasses and lose glasses constantly, so I appreciate the price. But I do think the experience is great. Like, it just makes it something that always seems so hard, feels so easy. And then like you can check out and be done in like three minutes. That's cool.

Speaker C: Especially when it's glasses that you need to see and exist. Like having to make an appointment, go to your eye doctor. Yeah, right.

Speaker A: That's like a two week process just to even get in the door. Right, that's exactly. I mean, I think that's such a good description of it because you're just like, oh, wait, I can just go do this. And they're going to get here in like three days. This is amazing.

Speaker C: That's awesome. Yeah, that is great. So how are you, um, again, sort of a broader question. How are you helping Ollie become more customer experience driven? I feel like it's part of that whole Olli experience, you know, as a

Speaker A: brand that got its start in brick and mortar and we still do probably 70% of our businesses done in brick and mortar. It's really easy, especially as a startup. So we started as a startup in 2015. We were acquired by Unilever in 2019. That's not a lot of years. It's not a lot of growing years. To be honest. It's really easy to think, oh, my customer is Target. Oh, my customer is Walmart. Oh, my customer is Safeway. And I think one of the cultural things that has had to shift at Ollie is not thinking about it that way, like, really understanding, but, like, who is the user? Like, whose hands are they in last? That is the customer. And culturally teaching that to, you know, groups and people that work in like the supply chain side and operations side, like, they don't think of it that way. And so for us, evangelizing that is the most important thing that we can do is truly advocating for the customer in every situation and kind of using those as like educational moments to say like, Walmart is not our customer, Target is not our customer. We don't ship pallets to a person. Our customer is the person who walks home with the product in their hand. And I think we all on the E commerce team truly understand that really well. So for us, that's sort of a point of evangelizing internally around just like, if we can't make our customer happy, what are we doing, like, if we're building products around profitability and not around customer use, what are we doing? So, I mean, at the end of the day, everything you have to do is for your customer. And customers can tell when it's not. I mean, they know. They know immediately, like, oh, you put this many servings in this product. That doesn't make any sense because you were trying to hit a price point, not because you were thinking a customer should have 30 days worth of product. You know what I mean? So I think there's like, even things like that where you just kind of think, like, why did we make this decision? Like, what was the motivation for that? Was it because that's what customers want or was it something else? And when it's something else, you have to take the time to unpack that, address it, and figure out how to pivot that closer to like, but what would a customer want? And also understanding that you are never your customer, like, that's like the number one rule in marketing, right? Like, there's always bias around. You think that you're the customer, you are never, ever, ever the customer. The way you use your website is never the way a customer uses your website. And don't even think for a second that it is. Like, you can't do that.

Speaker C: I mean, like, you mentioned you took off the sparkly sugar because the customers wanted it.

Speaker A: We did. I really liked it. Personally. I thought it was really good. But no, we. We do a lot of sentiment shopping around products and understanding, you know, whether customers like the texture, whether they like the flavor. And that's something that we're constantly monitoring and working on to make sure that it's what they want and it's as good as it can be.

Speaker C: I feel like this sort of ties in here, but how do you build trust?

Speaker A: Well, it's hard, I think, especially in the supplement space, because efficacy is always going to be number one if you're a supplement company, like, if it doesn't work, why even bother? Like, you, Nobody takes a vitamin just because it tastes good. If it doesn't do anything, there's no point. So for us, it starts with efficacy. And it starts with, does this solve a problem that people have? That's the very first thing you can do. And you have to make good products. You have to make products that work. That is like the foundation of that, I think, is like creating that trust is we can guarantee, we can promise you that our product works and that it's good and it will make you better. So that I think is really, really important. But then, uh, building on that, it's the consistency over time that I think builds the trust. And not only with the product and the product quality, but with the experience with the interactions. You know, are your products out of stock all the time? You know, just understanding. Are you speaking the language that your customer speaks? Are you calling it the same thing that they're calling it? Because that's one of the things I think we do a lot in retail is like we have our own names for things that customers have no idea what that means, but to us it's m important. To them it makes no difference. So just being able to consistently listen over a long period of time and also react like, like with the sugar, you know, understanding. Like customers would like there to be less sugar in their gummies. They still want them to taste good. They just would like there to be a little bit less sugar.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Let's do it. Let's, let's try. Let's see how it goes. So I think for us that is the consistency piece is probably the most important. Having the high quality product, having the really good product and then just keeping the standards the same over time and then also just communicating and being where the customer is, you know, whenever they're ready for more education or whenever they're ready to ask a question, all of that just builds over time.

Speaker C: Is there anything you'd like to say about like tying customer experience to business outcomes?

Speaker A: Yes. I always have felt in almost every role I've been in that if people who are decision makers in the business just spent more time with people who work in customer experience, like we would just be making such better decisions. It doesn't have to be every day, but I think the kind of reporting and the kind of feedback the customer experience team can offer should be. Is really eye opening. Again, like we talked about earlier, sometimes there's data that we don't like and a lot of that does come from customer experience where, you know, you have customers who don't like a product or maybe you've discontinued a product that customers absolutely love. Like they're the ones that have to go explain to the customers why it was discontinued. It's not the brand team, it's not the product development team. So I think more understanding and empathy across the business for what even with the customer experience team members do day to day and the conversations that they have just grows everyone's empathy and understanding overall. In the customer experience world, you get like terrible emails. I just asked our manager this morning and I was like, some days I don't know how you just don't hate people. And she's like, yeah, you get these. But then, you know, the next call I get is going to be someone who's just so happy that they got this product and it just made their life so much better. And she's like, we just have to focus on those things and not focus on, like, clearly, people that you can never make happy like, that really just are. You know, they do this with every brand. So I think that that's really important. I do feel like the more time spent with customer experience and the more. More avenues and places you give for that team to talk about what they do internally is really important too, because, like, they need to be on stage, like, they need to be visible. They need to be talking and describing what they do so that people understand it. Otherwise you kind of get back to this just like, oh, we're a call center. Like, but that's not. It can't be that anymore. It has to be personalized. It has to be meaningful. Those interactions have to matter, and they are the voice of the brand to the customer. At the end of the day, you talk to someone in our customer experience team and they're rude to you. Like, you will never forget that. Not that ours would ever be, but, you know, I mean, like, as a consumer, when you have a bad experience like that, you don't forget it. And they have to bounce back from somebody who just might have been really mean to them to the next call. And they have to be able to just kind of flip that switch and turn it right back on. And it's. It's really incredible that they can do it. And I think there's a lack of understanding and respect in most brands of that. And the more you can get them out there, the more you can put them in front of your teams, the better off everybody is.

Speaker C: Definitely, definitely so looking forward to the future of Ollie. What's next? What's next for Ollie? What's next for the customer experience?

Speaker A: You know, uh, it's like, wide open, right? Obviously, AI. There's going to be more AI everywhere, all the time. I do think that the next pivot in web design and web development, in, like, E commerce experiences, is truly about, like, real personalization. And that is a buzzword that you hear everywhere you go, literally everywhere you go. But at the same time, you can have a lot of conversations about what that even means in this scenario, in this context. What I mean is, like, if you click through an ad on Snapchat and you come to my website, it should be instantly recognizable that it knows you came from Snapchat, it knows what you were looking at and even like is customizing that experience around what your acquisition source was. If you've been to the site before, even more so. So I think that like machine learning piece of putting those behavioral pieces together is really the next evolution of online experience understanding. I come from this acquisition source. Maybe it is a low quality acquisition source or it's like less uh, likely to convert. So what does it take to convert that? Do they need a discount code? If so, what's going to be the right amount of the discount code to serve them that will help them convert for the first time? Then what does your retention machine look like once you get that customer into your retention machine? What do those communications look like? I think we're more developed in that space. Like we're more developed personalization wise in the email and SMS space than we are in the actual web experience space. So that to me is like the big gap of their handful of companies out there that kind of claim to do this. I have yet to see it done in a way that is easy, makes sense, is scalable, you know, that doesn't require like intense development work or uh, just a lot of work in general. There has to be somebody out there that's going to make this easy. There's uh, potential, uh, but this is the next evolution of personalization is truly like what do you see on the website and how is it different depending on who you are? We can do emails like that, we can do sms, we can build segments, we can do all these things. But when it comes to web experience, we're just not there yet. I'm sure it's coming, somebody's gonna, somebody's gonna do it. I mean that's one thing in this business as long as I've been in it, you know, like to see the coolest thing that can happen is you're somewhere, you see a tool, you see software, uh, whatever that solves a problem that you couldn't even clearly articulate. Like that is the best thing that can happen when you're like I just thought this was unsolvable. Like I, I just stopped thinking about it cause it was just a waste of my time. And then all of a sudden here's a solution that has that figured out and that is the best feeling. And that kind of going back to the very beginning, to me that's when like that technology and that marketing comes together to solve that problem that you couldn't even describe accurately. But then when you see the solution, you're like, yes, that's the solution.

Speaker C: I love that. That's such a good way to put it. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to add before we officially wrap?

Speaker A: If you haven't tried Ollie before, please do. They're wonderful. You'll love them.

Speaker C: They are wonderful. They're so good. And, um, Jennifer, it's been wonderful talking with you today. Thank you so much for spending the time with me. To our listeners, thank you for listening. If you have a second, please rate, review, subscribe and we'll catch you next time on CX Champions. Thank you so much.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker B: This podcast is brought to you by hgs, a global leader of digital customer experiences with the talent and technologies to champion every moment. Learn more at HDS CX.