How prioritising
customer care helped our start-up shine
Aron Gelbard
The business is a team of 25 based in South-West London,
and sends several thousand bouquets of flowers per week
across the whole of the UK.
Here, Gelbard explains how he went from start-up to
scale-up and achieved fast-growth success
by always putting the customer first…
In the years since co-founding Bloom & Wild, I’ve
learned that you have lots of disadvantages
as a start-up competing with established incumbents in an
industry –
they have large
customer bases, established brands and more resources.
But the one advantage you do have is that you
fundamentally care more about your customers.
This is because you’ve put everything on the line for
your business
whereas for employees of your competitors, however
passionate they are, it’s still their day job.
I’ve found that putting this obsession with care at the heart
of everything we do is something
that our customers notice and comment on, and is also
hugely motivational to our team.
This may sound obvious, but it has taken us a lot of
discipline to put this into practice
as we’ve moved from being a concept (flowers through the
letterbox)
to a high-growth company with an ambition to become the
UK’s favourite online florist.
I was recently invited to participate on behalf of Bloom
& Wild to be a member of Scale Up Club,
an initiative for promising high-growth young companies
organised by Silicon Valley
comes to the UK, which also includes businesses like
graze.com
and language learning app Busuu.
In preparing for a series of roundtables with other
start-up founders, I tried to crystallise
how we put our care for our customers at the heart of
everything we do
and how this has helped us earn the title of a ‘scale-up
business’:
1. Hire people who are passionate about creating
something
and delivering a fantastic experience
As a founder, you’ll always care a huge amount about your
business.
But you’ll stop being able to do everything yourself because there’ll
be too many things to do and it won’t be good for your health!
I also realised early on that there’s no one task or
process that someone else on my team
isn’t better than me at doing (the curse of being a
generalist founder).
As you start to trust others with important jobs that are
critical to your customers’ experience,
you realise that you can only do so if they care deeply
as well.
I’ve found that people who are deeply excited about our mission,
and
that put in the effort and care to turn that mission into a reality,
are the people we need on our team. And in fact, there’s
a strong correlation between
our best performing employees and those that seem to care
the most!
2. Design your experience for how your customers actually
shop
For Bloom & Wild, like almost all companies, a big
part of our business is about mobile.
Every business today is serving customers who are
spending many hours per day
on their mobile devices, including more mobile browsing
time than desktop browsing time.
Any customer-centric experience needs to be easy for
customers to use
when and how they want to, and this has to include mobile.
We
obsess over every possible way to reduce the need to type on a mobile screen!
As a start-up, another
mini-advantage you have is that you aren’t encumbered by legacy IT systems and
so you can more rapidly design a mobile first experience compared to a
competitor whose existing infrastructure prevents them from doing so.
3. Understand and eliminate customer anxiety
The best thing you can do is talk to as many people as
possible and understand how they feel
when they need to make a transaction, and what makes
them anxious.
I once read an interview with Uber’s Travis Kalanick and
he explained that Uber
decided to eliminate the ability to leave a tip, and to
instead build this into the price,
because he didn’t want his customers to worry about
whether to leave a tip,
how much to leave and how this would vary across
cultures.
In online flower gifting, the equivalent anxiety we
unearthed was that customers worried
that their recipients wouldn’t be at home to receive their
flowers,
and so they’d have to call them up and ruin the surprise,
or risk the flowers being left in a recycling bin or such
and potentially never arriving.
This was our rationale behind designing packaging
that
allows flowers to fit through the letterbox.
4. Be obsessed with your customers and their feedback
One of the few advantages of your size as a start-up is
that you can personally find ways
of both listening to your customers and turning their
feedback into a reality.
I try to personally answer customer phonecalls or emails
every day, and I regularly reach out
to customers who have come up in our website’s error logs
to understand what went wrong
and fix it for them – this also helps me stay on the
front foot
and make sure we are resolving any technical or product
issues really early on.
It’s so hard for a large organisation with many layers of
management
and process to replicate this and to make change happen
quickly, so take advantage of it!
http://startups.co.uk/how-prioritising-customer-care-helped-our-start-up-shine/
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I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times
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I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
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just for fun.
To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more
things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll
go.”
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