While trends come and go in fashion, one staple of menswear is the button-down shirt. And one brand that has become a pillar within the button-down shirt is &Collar. They are a pioneering brand in the menswear industry carrying a mission to be a part of every significant moment in a male’s life when they need to be wearing a dress shirt. The company prides itself on producing garments made from recycled plastic that are stain and wrinkle-resistant, while also being machine washable. The company was started by Ben Perkins in 2017.
Today, Ben spends a majority of his time focused on the eCommerce operations, specifically thinking about “enhancing customer retention, customer experience (CX) and optimizing the on-site experience,” as he told us. Ben further explained to us that “a significant part of my role involves improving customer service and ensuring a seamless customer journey from purchase to delivery for each and every one of our customers.”
Challenges Faced
When the company initially launched, the operations for &Collar's customer service was rudimentary. Ben and his team were responding to customer service inquiries through gmail with no real systems in place. Most of the time they were manually copying and pasting responses to common customer inquiries. And while they had no real data to support the types of issues that customers were contacting them about, “by far the most frequent customer inquiry was customers asking us where their order was,” Perkins mentioned. “Over time, we realized that the constant Where Is My Order (WISMO) inquiries were highlighting a major communication gap between us and our customers, as real-time updates were lacking.”
Ben realized that in order to improve the CX, they needed a system that would allow customers to get answers proactively and preemptively. This led him to seek out solutions that could enhance customer communication and overall satisfaction.
Transition to Wonderment
Wonderment was not Ben’s first software solution aimed at trying to deliver &Collar’s customers a better CX. “We tried two other big-name solutions in the same space as Wonderment prior to making the switch to Wonderment. But we ended up switching to Wonderment because we weren’t thrilled with the results we were seeing,” Perkins explained to us.
Ben knew that a brand that he admired in the same space as &Collar was using Wonderment so he was curious to learn more about the solution and was sold on the product very quickly. “Wonderment offers such a high-level of customization from a branding perspective than the other players in the space. Our post-purchase emails are so important because customers are very engaged with our brand, so we knew that we were missing an opportunity if we weren’t able to fully customize the message with our brand and send people to our own tracking page.”
The &Collar team was quickly sold on switching to Wonderment and immediately saw value with the product and team right away. “The onboarding process with Wonderment was seamless and the team was just amazing - out of all of the software solutions that I’ve been onboarded to over the years, this was the best onboarding experience that I’ve had. The Wonderment team helped us set everything up and build out our templates, saving us so much time,” Ben told us.
Impact of Wonderment on &Collar
It didn’t take long for &Collar to start seeing tangible results after they onboarded to Wonderment. Ben pointed out three main areas where they have seen significant improvements over their previous CX provider:
- Reduction in "Where is my order?" tickets: “Our WISMO tickets account for about 70% of our total ticket volume and since we switched to Wonderment, we have seen our total ticket volume drop by more than 14%. This has been a game-changer for our customer support team, freeing up their time to work on more strategic initiatives.”
- Repeat Purchase Rate: “We have seen an increase in our repeat purchase rate by 11% in the past 12 months which has certainly helped us grow profitably, which in today’s difficult environment is huge for us.”
- 12-Month Lifetime Value (LTV): “In addition to reducing our WISMO tickets by 14% and increasing our repeat purchase rate by 11%, we’ve seen our 12-month customer lifetime value increase by 21% over our previous provider.”
But these have not been the only positive results that &Collar has seen, as they have been able to be more proactive with order management issues. “Thanks to Wonderment’s Slack integration, any time a shipping issue arises, our customer support team is notified that a package may be delayed. While we already have an automated email going out to the customer to let them know about the delay, this notification also allows us to personally reach out to the impacted customer to let them know about the issue and ask them if we can do anything to help support them. This leads to us positively impacting three to four customers a day, which over time really helps us build a loyal customer base.”
Having the ability to manually reach out to customers to get ahead of these issues is creating lots of happy customers and that is evident by the fact that “our Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is 4.96 out of 5 - and Wonderment has a lot to do with that nearly perfect score.”
Future Plans with Wonderment
It’s clear that Wonderment has been a game-changer for &Collar, enhancing their customer service and operational efficiency. Due to this, Ben and the &Collar team are excited about expanding with Wonderment in the future. “I’m very excited to begin using Wonderment’s Delivery Promise feature so we can bring both our post and pre-purchase experience together within one platform and continue to deliver our customers a strong customer experience.”
If you are interested in learning more about how Wonderment can help increase your customer satisfaction scores, while simultaneously increasing key revenue metrics for your business, set-up time with our team to learn more.
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