Retail » Delivery Exception Management » Grove Collaborative
About Grove Collaborative
Founded in 2014, Grove Collaborative started as a pact to make every home healthy and safe with natural cleaning and personal care products. The company is dedicated to helping customers rethink how products come into their homes, offering solutions that are sustainable, affordable, and beautiful.
As a fast-growing CPG brand, Grove focuses on making customer service its differentiator. The company prides itself on doing whatever it takes to make their customers happy, putting in place a Customer Happiness Team to ensure the company is uncovering every opportunity to connect with their customers, and offering a 100% Happiness Guarantee to help customers get the most out of their products.
Business Challenge
As Grove's business amplified, so did shipping exception rates. The Customer Happiness Team knew if it could get out in front of exceptions, Grove could differentiate themselves and inspire loyalty while saving time and money. This goal was critical to drive forward -- they did not want customers having to clean up messes left from damaged shipments or have to locate their orders on their own if there was an incorrect address. It was imperative for them to let customers know, ASAP, what was going on with their shipments.
Accomplishing this was a daunting challenge. The team was receiving exceptions from various carrier partners via email. They would arrive randomly, and there was little consistency from carrier to carrier. This created challenges for internal workflows, speed, and accuracy of response.
The team migrated exceptions into their support platform, Zendesk, but it only solved half the problem. Communicating with carriers to solve these issues was time consuming and costly -- in some cases they could be on hold for more than an hour trying to update an incorrect address for their customer.
The Convey Solution
In May 2018, Grove launched Convey Engage, and they immediately recognized how it could help them connect with their customers as shipping volume continued to scale. The team had a uniform view into all their shipping issues, in real-time across carriers. Everyone on the Customer Happiness team has access to the Convey platform, and is able to contact carriers to resolve issues when a customer reports an issue. Additionally, Grove created a dedicated exception resolution team whose goal is to proactively prevent customer complaints by addressing the most common causes of delivery issues.
The efficiencies gained by having structured workflows and real-time ability to take action have been significant, and are one of many reasons the relatively small team of just ~70 people have been able to solve over 110,000 points of contact in a single month.
Within six months, Grove’s NPS score rose by 9.4%, and their CSAT by 1%. While both experience and productivity improvements were clear wins, the team was surprised to see that the business could also save $65 per shipment from proactively handling damage claims and $23 per shipment from resolving incorrect addresses alone.
Additionally, as bandwidth has improved, the team was able to devote time to new happiness initiatives, like their “Grove Guides” program which aims to educate customers on their product lines to help customers identify the solutions that are right for their family. Now in its 3rd month, the initiative has been proven to increase customer AOVC by 50%.
The Results
Improved customer happiness, revenue and loyalty:
9.4%
increase in overall NPS
50%
increase in AOVC
+3 point NPS
compared to average when issues are positively resolved
Operational efficiency and cost savings
$65 saved
per damage claim and $23 saved per incorrect address
77%
reduction in response time
50% reduction
in damaged shipment Zendesk tickets, each representing $4 in savings