Episode Details

How do modern brands create joyful customer experiences that last a lifetime? Charlie Cole, Chief Digital Officer of luxury travel brand Tumi, Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of customer support platform Gladly join us to talk about how to know your customer, how to anticipate their needs, and how to stand out in a sea of startup DTC players. Listen now!

Main Takeaways:

• Charlie Cole (Chief Digital Officer, TUMI) and Joseph Ansanelli (CEO and Co-Founder, Gladly) join Brian and Phillip as their special guests on today's episode.

• Most brands today focus on custom acquisition as opposed to focusing on the lifetime value of their customers.

• Brands like TUMI are adapting their customer service to include new mediums of communication to meet customers where they want to be met.

• Non-transactional experiences that exist in a single moment are what retailers are striving to capture digitally to create lasting memories and brand affiliation.

How Gladly Got Started: A Brief History:

• Joseph starts by discussing how it was clear that the way in which consumers today engage, communicate, and transact has radically changed in the past decade and how this affected how companies interacted with consumers.

• Gladly set out to not only transform the way people do commerce but also how a brand services, engages with and markets to its consumers.

• As Joseph was coming up with Gladly, Charlie was one of the first people that he reached out to as Charlie was pushing the boundaries of what you could do in the direct-to-consumer world.

• 'Given his professional history, TUMI was Charlie's attempt to work for a larger company and was known for making amazing things in a remarkably customer-centric way.

• Charlie recounts how Joseph's initial pitch of Gladly made a lot of sense and was better than anything else on the market and how it fit with their goal of modernizing the customer experience.

The Slippery Slope of Personalization: Customizing Customer Experience With Big Data:

• Charlie mentions that many data points are collected from customers, some voluntarily and some that customers might not even know that they are volunteering.

• How do brands use this data to enhance the customer experience?

• Customer "value" is usually interpreted as a revenue number as opposed to quantifying a positive retail experience.

• Gladly allows brands to understand the entire customer journey and leverages that data to help the customer as much as possible.

• Conversion rate is such a small part of the customer journey, and it bugs Charlie when eCommerce companies brag about it.

Treating Customer Like Humans: The Value of Connection:

• "The best marketing is customer service, and if you treat people as people, it will pay dividends down the road."

• Joseph brings up that one of Gladly's goals is to enable brands to meet customers in places where those customers want to be reached.

• TUMI's phone number is now text message enabled, meaning that customers can elect to communicate via SMS as opposed to being locked into a phone call.

• Brian brings up how Ingrid Milman (in her most recent appearance on the show) said that customer relationship is an even higher priority than the brand story.

The Bigger Problem: How Retail Has Evolved to Backseat Customers:

• Charlie completely agrees with Ingrid's comment and says that one of the problems that we have as retailers is that most of our incentives are based on the acquisition of customers.