117 Curious About...Retention & CX in the DTC Space w/Eli Weiss | Retention & CX Thought Leader |VP Retention Advocacy-Yotpo
Welcome to the My Curious Colleague podcast with me, Denise Venneri. I am a twenty year practitioner in the consumer engagement space, having worked for two large CPG organizations. My intent here is really to share best practices with particular focus around the specialist and analyst roles and to give back to this great community because CPGCX rocks.
Denise Venneri:Hello, my curious colleagues. This week, I'm curious about consumer care and retention specifically in the direct to consumer space and beyond. And to help me understand just that is my colleague Eli Weiss, a retention thought leader and VP of retention advocacy at Yotpo. Welcome to the podcast Eli.
Eli Weiss:Thanks for having me. I'm excited about this conversation.
Denise Venneri:Same here. Same here. And the reason I wanted to hear from you is, you know, I don't think it's a prediction, but it it is a belief that I have that all future CPG, consumer finance, consumer affairs functions, the one that I've had my experience in, will eventually have some or full responsibility to support TTC and online sales. Right? Like, say, for example, you've got a health bar and it's you went right into the retail market and got great distribution.
Denise Venneri:And then for some strategic reason, you moved to DTC, you know, and you're responsible for that. Those sales there online, but then also they launch a wearable, for example. This is really a crazy example. But that wearable is not offered in retail and only online. So anyway, I I my my thinking is eventually consumer affairs will have to support.
Denise Venneri:So that's why I like to have this sort of discussion with you to understand that piece of things. So let's get back to you and let's begin with you telling us how you got to here.
Eli Weiss:Yeah. I I appreciate you taking the time, to chat with me. I think for most, careers are kind of a pre a pre planned event with a little bit of maybe a detour, but I think most people kind of decide what they wanna do when they're in high school. They go to college for that. They finish college.
Eli Weiss:They start kind of deciding what's working, what isn't, and slowly kind of morph their career to what they're interested in. Mhmm. For me, it was a little bit different. I grew up number two of 10 children in a very orthodox Jewish world. So very nontraditional background.
Eli Weiss:Most of the people from my community just kind of jumped into whatever their family did or whatever their neighbor did or kind of, like, chose to work at at a familiar company or familiar space. For me, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn't graduate high school, until I did my GED in my twenties and go to college, traveled the world in my early twenties. So saw, you know, a bunch of Europe, 20 something countries before I was, like, 23. So really wasted a lot of my time, just messing around and got to a point where I needed I needed some sort of a job.
Eli Weiss:And I jumped into ecomm, customer service because I thought I understood what customers wanted being a difficult customer myself. I would kind of call these companies and ask for something, and they'd kind of say, like, we're sorry. There's nothing we can do. And in the back of my head, I'm like, I just wanna be heard and understood. And I remember being like a chronically difficult, like, 16 year old being, you know, kinda going back and forth with someone at some company.
Eli Weiss:And at some point, I said, like, you could have easily gotten me off the call if you just took some sort of accountability and responsibility and just said, like, we get it. We messed up. We apologize. Truly, I wish I can help, but there's nothing in my power I can do. At least show me that you're personally invested.
Eli Weiss:And I think for me, that was like a really, really, felt like a unique understanding and how easy customer service can be if you just took accountability. That led me to my first customer service job in my early twenties, at a luggage brand, super delayed on Kickstarter. Most of the customers wanted a refund. The money wasn't quite there to refund because they spent it on development. And for me, it was just being brutally honest and authentic about what has been going on and taking personal accountability just transformed the business.
Eli Weiss:So that was really early, early start in CX. Again, like, very, very different than the more evolved parts of of, the industry. I think CX was kind of like retention. It was just finding its footing in the last ten years in direct to consumer brands Mhmm. Or the last twenty years, especially, like you said, direct to consumer versus more retail forward, businesses and kind of, like, having that unique connection one to one with customers is is not hundreds of years old.
Eli Weiss:It's tens. So I spent a bunch of time there, got excited about startups because it was, like, the only place I can kind of, like, earn my way there without having to prove anything other than the fact that I was willing to do the work. Spent a bunch of years just kind of doing customer service, and then eventually kind of had a breakout role in Olipop. I was there early days, number 16. Saw that business go from 16 to 75 and kind of ballooned past there over the last couple of years.
Eli Weiss:Eventually jumped into a beauty brand called Jones Road Beauty, which was founded by Bobby Brown. So saw, like, a bootstrapped celebrity owned startup. I was there for almost two years. And then long story short, midlife crisis or quarter life crisis into a into a technology company, which is a longer story for maybe a different time, but kind of the evolution of customer service to customer experience, to building a network around that, to getting excited about retention, to getting excited about flipping onto the other side, and better understanding how to service the people that I spent a decade plus working alongside.
Denise Venneri:Wow. I'm exhausted. Just How do
Eli Weiss:you think I feel?
Denise Venneri:Just thinking about that those careers. But what you depict to me is this phrase I had heard last year, this rock wall. Is it rock wall, Clammy? Yeah. Where instead of just having, you know, going up the proverbial career ladder straight on up, breaking the glass ceiling for women, etcetera.
Denise Venneri:It's more of like, different steps you take a little to the right, a little to the left, eventually you reach your goal. So that's pretty cool. And, and you are a pretty savvy 16 year old. I gotta I gotta tell you that.
Eli Weiss:What is it that they say about, like, necessity breeding innovation? I think, you know, growing up in a very large family in a very kind of, like, sheltered territory, you know, like, we we didn't really have access to TV. We weren't widely available on the Internet. So I I think you just you just become, like, you just you just innovate because that's all you have. For me, you know, growing up in a large family, I was always I always just, as any kid does, you want new things, you want things that your parents can't necessarily, as much money as they will ever have.
Eli Weiss:10 kids is just a lot. And you come up with creative ways to find the things you wanna do. And for me, that was like, you know, my grandparents worked, they had a food distribution company and I would kind of like finagle some free kind of like chocolate coated wafers from my grandfather and then flip it up cost price or full price. So like there were innovative ways where I where I made some money as a kid and then use that money to try to buy things. Then I'd buy things and I'd work six months to be able to afford this pair of shoes I was excited about.
Eli Weiss:And then I got it and two weeks later, it just, like, wasn't great quality. And as a 16 year old, you you kind of you're like, what if I call them? Will they help me? So yeah.
Denise Venneri:Well, we're we are simpatico on one thing. One, I am the second, but second of four children. But I believe that that exact phrase that people, you know, consumers just wanna be heard. For sure. For sure.
Denise Venneri:Let's let's keep on this esoteric, I think, reflection conversation here. And when I asked you, could you help me, you know, propose frame up a really juicy question, So I don't always do, but you framed up this one. Where do you see the battle between AI, yes, artificial intelligence, versus humanity that's currently going on, and where might you see it in in the future?
Eli Weiss:So I think the promise of AI, and I've been like a fairly early user of, like, the the AI interface back when it was, like, open source in the early days of of OpenAI. And I I think the promise we we got was this won't necessarily take away jobs. It'll give you an opportunity to do more high leverage tasks. And I think I think that was to some extent a lie. Right?
Eli Weiss:Like, I think ChatGPT will ultimately over time take away jobs. And the question is, like, what happens after that, which is not a discussion that that I'm smart enough to to have on this podcast. But I I think that the the promise we had was it'll open up time for more high leverage tasks, and I just don't see businesses doing that today. Right? So I think businesses have chosen to either fully staff a team with a hundred humans, especially on CX.
Eli Weiss:Right? You either have a hundred humans or entirely AI and not a single person on the team. And I I just think that's, like, a fatal mistake for customer experience as a whole. I think the promise, we had should should kind of you know, I think as as any pendulum swings, we'll swing pretty strongly both ways, but I think where we'll end up is is a highly leveraged human team that helps, you know, like, what we have today with, like, chat bots and elementary FAQ docs and kind of, like, running in circles to try to get an answer that you don't quite get. I think AI on chat will get much, much better and resolve 70 to 80% of the problems.
Eli Weiss:And the other 20% of the problems, you'll have, like, a fully equipped, really high EQ team that'll kind of hand hold you to get to the, you know, like, when when shit really hits the fan, when you're really frustrated and you've gone back and forth with the executive office on god knows what for god knows how long, I think that's when you'll have really, really high leverage, well paid, humans that'll jump in and kind of create order. And, again, like, the the back and forth on, like, can AI be super empathetic? Maybe. Is that the world we wanna live in where you talk to robots because they're more empathetic than humans? I mean, not me.
Eli Weiss:Yikes. Right? Yikes. Yeah. That's that's my thoughts.
Eli Weiss:It's like, yikes. And I I do think, yes, AI can respond like a human, but I do think the highly leveraged important impactful moments for your top customers for when things really break, you know, the service recover recovery paradox when when things are really broken, I I I truly think that's where humans shine, and I think businesses are going way too far to the left or or the right, whichever team you're on here.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. What what I'm hearing is we're not yet there on what it's gonna end up. I think there's there is going to be this trial and error. Some some error, excuse me, some people probably haven't even dipped their toe in AI. But seeing all this going on and wondering, I think is, is, interesting taking up a lot of our time, but we do love the details here at, my curious colleague, Eli, and I'm wondering if we can get into the details into some examples of where maybe it's been implemented and an outcome that you've seen?
Eli Weiss:Yeah. I think Please. The the the quick wins that I've seen, and I'll I'll give you both on customer experience and retention. I think from a retention point of view, there's so much guesswork. And I think brands look at email and look at SMS and look at larger retention channels.
Eli Weiss:It's like, how do I continue to get to, like, statistically significant outcomes that I can then leverage to kind of do phase two and phase three and keep testing and keep iterating? And I think what a lot of brands have lost is the ability to, a, deeply understand large swaths of information, and, b, kind of, like, deduce potential next steps based on that information. And I think that's one thing that AI does really, really well. So for example, if I've run 27 different campaigns, here are the data here here's kind of like the outcomes of each and every single one of these, whether it's the conversion, whether it's the revenue per recipient, whatever kind of outcome you're looking for, and then be able to kind of feed all that information into an AI infrastructure and decide, like, okay. Here's what I've done so far.
Eli Weiss:And kind of talking to the AI and say, keep me honest. Like, is there anything I should have tested that I didn't? Is there something I should kind of like, any any any outcome that you think I should take from this? So I think that's, like, something that I've seen work quite well is just feeding all your information, to as simple as, oh, as ChatGPT. I think the the other kind of, like, the flip of that is leveraging a tool, like, whether it's Triple Whale or, like, a lot of these data analytics tools, you can kind of just connect to your website, and you can just have, like, they they have that chatbot that you can basically instead of running code, to kind of, like, query your data, you can just treat it like it's a human and ask questions directly layered on top of your data.
Eli Weiss:So basically say like, hey, looking at the last three weeks, which channel has been most efficient for increasing lifetime value or which cohort of customers has been the strongest? And historically, you'd need multiple data analysts and a data infrastructure warehouse, etcetera, etcetera, and somebody running, SQL or whatever, querying the you know, using code to query the data. And today, you can just literally ask the question like a human. So I think that's on the retention side. Like you can truly better understand a large con a large swath of of data and say like, okay, what do I do?
Eli Weiss:On the CX side, I think to my point earlier, it's it's the thing that works well is understanding as a business how much you can feed to the AI gods and the the overlords and kind of like understand, like, how much of this is actually I say it's like low lift, easy question answers. How much of it actually is? So being honest with yourself, I think that's worth for us at at Jones is we said, okay. Honestly, probably 40% is truly easy questions. And for other brands, it might be 90% depending on what you're selling, what your customer cohorts like, what your audience cares about.
Eli Weiss:Right? So Jones, for example, you have, like, a good again, for the sake of this example, I don't I don't, I can't share the exact numbers, but assume it's 30% of people that are reaching out are trying to get, like, a shade match, with a selfie they sent in. That cannot yet be done by AI. So you're already down to only 70% is even in the in the in the total potential market here. And then of the 70%, like, how many of them are related to where's my order?
Eli Weiss:How many of them are related to basic questions? And a lot of those, like anything that's readily available from your product page Mhmm. Through a connection to your tracking information, like all of that. A customer reaches out, they wanna know where their order is. They just want the tracking number.
Eli Weiss:They just wanna know where it is. You don't need a human clicking buttons to do that. I think that's easily feasible. And that's a good example of, like, better understanding what percentage can actually be, quicker answer but accurate answer. And then better understanding, like, what percentage need high touch and can you actually say it's worth the high touch because it'll drive a better outcome.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. So okay. Got it. That low hanging fruit versus the other.
Eli Weiss:Okay.
Denise Venneri:We we touched on a little bit about me, of course, that I'm familiar with consumer product goods. And, you know, when you think of classic consumer affairs teams that I've been around, you know, we, we have supported what I'll call incoming consumer comments from a variety of channels. So these are the consumers decisions to reach out to the company. Whereas, you know, what I understand a little bit about retention, a little bit different retention, ultimately, developing that customer relationship should generate some sales towards the end of this model, is is my understanding there. And so my question is, how do you think emails and SMS or text serves these DTC brands?
Denise Venneri:You know, as it relates to some of these hypothetical things, I think it's doing revenue retention, cross selling, things like that.
Eli Weiss:I I think the Denise, the framing of your question is very important because I think, there's, like, a little a little bit of a confusion around retention, the title and and the connection to the action you're actually taking. And I I think that's something that's not addressed often enough, which is something I I wanna kind of, like, put a needle in is good attention should be. Right? Like, it should be the idea that you can help customers stick around based on understanding what they care about and making sure they feel welcome to stick around. But instead, it's turned into this extremely outbound, very salesy, very kind of, like, pushy, non authentic weirdness where you just send as many emails as you need to in order to solve, solve your quote, unquote problem, which is driving more revenue.
Eli Weiss:So I think retention, whereas it should have been this kind of, like, soft, more of an art, it became more of a science, and it became kind of, like, you can just call it sales and outbound sales, and it would kind of be the same thing. Right? You're sending emails and SMS to drive people to make more money, to spend more money. So I think it's kind of a confusion there and maybe maybe taking a wrong turn, as like, it's evolved in the wrong way, in my opinion. Mhmm.
Eli Weiss:I think it should be softer. I think retention should be diving deeper into the customer care aspect and better understanding, like, what people love and hate about your brand and leveraging those is, like, organic easy ways to get people to come back. So I think that's a is, like, currently retention is very, very sales driven, very kind of, like, dry and sciency way of assuming a customer bought twelve days ago, and we know based on data that they should purchase again at sixteen days, send them three emails and four texts in those three, four days to do whatever it takes to get them to come back. Because if not, who knows? They'll forget about us forever.
Eli Weiss:And I think that's, like, my hot take is that a lot of that is driven by just, like, growth marketing taking over the world of e com and us just getting really, really excited about spending money to make money as the only kind of, like, short term way, click a button, make the money. And we've kind of, like, failed. We lost the humanity in this of, like, people repurchase when they like the product and they like your experience, and it's on you to make sure they like the product, they like the experience. And we've chosen shortcuts over and over and over. Right?
Eli Weiss:Like, we've chosen shortcuts of just drive them crazy enough and hope that you kind of break them into submission versus how do we make sure we deliver just a fantastic product and a journey. And that's probably, I'm gonna get off my high horse and stop rambling, but that's something that bothers me deeply.
Denise Venneri:I appreciate you, your transparency and sharing that. I do. I do. Again, with the details. So I'm hearing, like, I'm hearing all that.
Denise Venneri:And I'm just wondering is, can you think of an example where, you know, these channels use of EMS, EMS, I just called it SMS and emails where it was implemented and, implemented appropriately.
Eli Weiss:Yeah. I mean, I think the the two the two pieces here are the brands that do this quite well, number one, view this as a holistic communication strategy. So it's not just one person send as many emails as they can and the other kind of supplement it with a with additional abuse from SMS angle. I think that's, like, the mistake. So I think brands that do this well think holistically and think, like, what should be an email versus, you know, when people jump into a meeting and they're they say that could have been an email.
Eli Weiss:So I think, like, a lot of that on on marketing is also, like, that should have been an email, not a text. Like, I don't need to get a text every time you decide you think it's time for me to buy. So I think there's, like, understanding how text marketing is just so much more urgent and invasive than an email because an email you kind of open when you're ready for it. A text is a ding on your phone. So I think that's number one is, like, brands that understand how these two channels work one with another and understand, like, the larger customer journey.
Eli Weiss:And number two, I'd say, like, when done well, brands deeply understand just how to make these sync together. So, yes, understanding what should be email and what should be SMS, but understanding how they sync together. So if I get an email at this point in time, what should the SMS be that's following it? So thinking of a customer journey cohesively and not, like, just channel. So, yes, understanding which channel should be used and understanding how they play well together.
Eli Weiss:Brands that do this well, I think, you know, not to toot my own horn, but I do think the early days of Olipop, we did this very well by understanding that in the days of SMS in 2019, '20 '20
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Eli Weiss:People weren't interested in getting texts from a soda company every two every two days or once a day. They were interested in getting really kind of, like, intimate messages that felt like they were inside of a fast growing company
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Eli Weiss:At the right time. So what we did was we leveraged, like, the founder would take a selfie of him with a new flavor launch and truly describe why he formulated this flavor. And I think that that like, we sold more of the new flavor via text in the first few hours than we sold in, like, a week on email just because people
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Eli Weiss:Were so invested in understanding the why behind the product. Yeah. And SMS turns out as the channel to do that. So I think, like, early days of and again, like, as channels evolve, I think strategies evolve. And as brands evolve, I think the way the brand talks to customers evolve.
Eli Weiss:But being intentional back then was was for us, like, the most magical thing.
Denise Venneri:You know, if folks wanted to find out more about your company that you work at Yotpo or chat with you about using these channels, what's the next step they should take?
Eli Weiss:That is a great question. So easiest way to find out about Yotpo is y0tp0.com. Yotpo is like a retention marketing platform that, you know, has reviews and loyalty and email and SMS, and is kind of trying to build this holistic this tool that thinks about channels holistically. So better understanding the full customer journey, not just a bunch of little tools doing their own thing in their own own corner. Mhmm.
Eli Weiss:So that's an easy one. Myself, Eli Weiss, e l I w e I s s. There's almost always an extra s when it's any kind of, like, links just because Eli Weiss is too popular of a name. So, it's Eli Weiss on LinkedIn, but Eli Weiss with an on Twitter or Eli Weiss with an extra s dot com, for the newsletter I write about these things. But, other than that, I think that's all I've that's all I've got as far as links.
Denise Venneri:I think that's plenty. Fair. Yeah. Hey. Sadly, we're at the end of our time, Eli, and I just wanna say thank you so much for sharing your your thoughts with us.
Eli Weiss:Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Doug Venneri:You have been listening to the My Curious Colleague podcast with Denisse Vineri. Thank you for your time.
