Paul Morrison

Hello and welcome to retail and Consumer Pulse brought to you by WNS, our mission on this podcast is to unpack the world of retail and consumer goods, exploring the latest and most innovative thinking from industry experts and leaders. My name is Paul Morrison. I lead the WNS retail and consumer practice in Europe and for today's session, I'm delighted to be joined by SJ Grabiec from AllSaints. Hi SJ.

SJ

Hello Paul, how are you?

Paul Morrison

It's great to great to have you. So SJ, you are the global head of customer experience of payments at the leading fashion retailer AllSaints. And we're going to dig into your journey and experiences in retail and AI in terms of customer experience and post-purchase. So we've got a lot of great, great themes to dig into. So perhaps just to get us going, could you tell us a little bit about your background and your current role?

SJ

Absolutely. Well firstly, just thank you so much Paul for inviting me along today. It's been a little while since you and I met and connected at the Retail CX exchange in July this year. So it's a real pleasure there to be here today. So, yeah, sure. So my background is predominantly in retail, you know across both sort of customer-facing store roles and then also head office roles as well over across several brands and then also a few years’ experience of post-graduation in risk management consultancy setting as well, which is quite quite varied experience there, but always super passionate about customer-people partnerships, which I do think is the foundation of successful brands and also really amazing customer experience as well. But my role at the moment as you've said is global head of CX fraud and payments across AllSaints, but also our brother company, John Varvatos is based in the states.

Paul Morrison

Yeah.
Mm hmm mm hmm.

SJ

Overall, my focuses are, you know improving the customer and brand experience and that's for the customer and our team as well. We do have sort of like a dual lens there because we think both sort of four hand in hand and that culture is really important. But also making sure the voice of our customers represented managing projects and innovation such as AI and post-purchase that we're going to talk about today. And that's across both CX, you know payments fraud and you know partnerships with our carrier partners as well to ensure the experience is as smooth as possible.

Paul Morrison

Well, so that's keeping you busy.

SJ

That certainly is. That it keeps me out of trouble, Paul.

Paul Morrison

There's, there's a lot there. That's great. Well, maybe you could also for those on the podcast who not yet familiar with AllSaints, how would you describe the brand and the experience you're trying to create with that?

SJ

Sure. I mean, for those that don't know AllSaints you know we are a British contemporary fashion brand with definitely a bit of an attitude and a little bit of an edge. We're a little bit different and it was actually our 30th birthday this year. So there's been many, many celebrations. I know like we're truly adulting, you know and we actually, we curate both menswear and women's wear, ready-to-wear collections and that includes footwear and accessories and we also launched a really beautiful new fragrance collection this year. And actually, most recently, Smallsaints. So our children's wear collection, I know it's absolutely adorable. And then also opticals with boots as well. So yeah, we've got a lot's happened this year, lots of exciting things. But overall, you know our strategic pillars as a business fall across a couple of areas. The first one which probably goes about saying is product. The second one is marketing distribution and the way we break this down is product is like we make the coolest clothes, right? Marketing is we need to tell everyone that we make the coolest clothes and then distribution is we need to make sure that our cool clothes or where our customers need them essentially.

And then there's two sort of arms around those pillars as well which is then customer and teams so that's kind of how we that those are sort of things that we that is the sorts of areas that we sort of focus on as a business and we all really get behind but I think on top of that, we are very passionate as a business that AllSaints is a business of feelings. And that extends to both team and customer and I think that's really important. We want to put a fine point on that because I think we believe it's, you know, our entire team's collective responsibility to remain profoundly human, which I know sound may sound ironic considering we're going to talk about AI in a minute, but actually it's about making sure our customers know and you know and our team to a point that they're connecting to a group of like real people.

And the importance of our, you know, we have amazing people in our business and you know, I was at a brand day earlier this year. We're actually celebrating our 30th birthday and I think one of the things that really stood out to me was just how many people truly care about this brand, care about each other, you know, and care about our customers. So it was the importance of, you know, even though we're a business at scale, you know, remaining as one-to-one as possible for our teams and customer, but.

I think that leads really sorry. Go on.

Paul Morrison

That's no, that's that's that's really, really interesting. Interesting stuff and just to pick out a few points there. I mean as a brand it is, it is highly distinctive even you know as on the high street, you don't miss it and AllSaints.

SJ

No.

Paul Morrison

Outlet at door shop, do you? It's very it's really. It's sort of striking, but the way they're saying around the need to sort of to stay to say human and to connect it's there's a there's a really important, but maybe difficult things to achieve. So I'm very keen to hear how you do that.

SJ

Yeah, absolutely. But well, I think that leads nicely into kind of the experiencing we're trying to create with for our customers at AllSaints. And I think the first one and you've already said it is the human connection is just such a top priority, whether that's engaging in our stores, you know, our store teams create a great environment, what you know, really personal service, but also you know how does that translate into the virtual world. So a human connection, I have phones.

Our phone lines in a contact center in my opinion and you know the equivalent to a face-to-face in store. So it's like really harmless thing and prioritizing the phones which I know is actually probably you know it's.

Paul Morrison

Right.

SJ

Some people in the industry think phones are actually or we don't need to have phones anymore, whereas I disagree. I actually think because we want to remain profoundly human, and because we want to remain one-to-one, then actually the phone lines are very, very important for that, you know, and also you can resolve something so much quicker over the phone, you know, rather than having a back and forth on e-mail, you know, maybe for, you know, two-three back and forth. So you can talk to someone for a few minutes on a phone, sort something out and then you can both, you know, that customer can go.

Paul Morrison

Hmm.

SJ

And move on with their day. So I think so the importance of human connection is #1. In terms of saying we want to, you know, continue creating and prioritizing AllSaints and I think as a result of that, you know, by remaining profoundly human, I think you then build trust and confidence and your for your customers because they know that you know that they that they can get through to someone who can support them, whether it's in store or whether they're online. I think the other thing as well is convenience. So this is where the counter balance comes in a little bit because I think we have to have the right channels available. You need to have.

The right answers the right the people with the right skill sets, and then in some cases you do need to have some automation to be able to provide sort of scalable support on what I would consider maybe sort of sort of more repetitive topics that potentially don't need a human to sort of step in and intervene as such.

Paul Morrison

Mm hmm mm hmm.

SJ

I do think, you know, we're looking at increased availability. You know, we are a global business. So we operate across many countries, we ship to hundreds of countries. You know we have customers all over the world.

And particularly as a service team, you know, we need to make sure that our customers can reach us when they need us essentially. So I do think increased availability and sort of being there at the right time for the customers, a big part of it, I'd say the other experience that we want to continue creating and again put a fine point on is again it's that human engagement piece because I think when I presented back at the Retail CX Exchange, I said that, you know, customer experience now is actually about 90% emotional intelligence.

And the human engagement element of it is that our team members and I think you know, in contact centers, they're called contact center agents or senior agents or customer service associates, but really they're professional communicators and professional problem solvers because that's what they do. So it's like really the training that we're doing. Obviously, there's all the operational training and process training that absolutely we need to do, but actually there's more importance on just being just being a human and being talking to someone, being empathetic, being genuine, solving the problem and just being really good at communicating.

So we're putting a sort of definitely a magnifying glass over that. And I always say to my team that service is like photography because you need to always turn those negatives into positives and you know, and I think that, but it's true, isn't it, you know? So it's like if someone if someone calls and they've had a bad experience, you know they've spoken to, you know, one of my team members and they're like, look, I didn't like the experience, but, you know, I spoke to this person and they were really great and they helped me and they sorted me out and, you know, and I think that it's a testament to the brand, isn't it being able to turn something around?

Paul Morrison

Definitely no. It's. Yeah, you can. That's transformative. If, if, if and when that's achieved. And I think you see playing a really interesting powerful picture there about where, where and how customer experience is central to what you're trying to do at the organization and the need to keep the interactions human-centric and emotional.

SJ

Yeah.

Paul Morrison

Those are, you know, very, very interesting and.

Central objectives you have and so into this journey, then.

You've been introducing additional technology and AI to make new things possible. What? Where did that come from? What's the origins of that, that focus?

SJ

Yeah, of course. Sure. Well, actually, it it's actually to complement the fact that we want to remain inherently human, which sounds really counterintuitive, I know. But essentially it came from a few key areas. So the key factors that we looked at and the rationale behind AI were a few things. One was the fact that we hadn't been innovative, right? So we felt maybe we're a little bit behind, you know, a lot of a lot of other businesses and brands were beginning their, you know we're already on.

Their automation journeys, and it wasn't something that we'd kind of really harnessed yet. So I guess innovation was the first thing you know. And the reason it took us a little while to make the decision and take that innovative step was actually because we actually needed to implement a new tech stack in 2022, which was implemented successfully. But what that did is it gave us a highly integratable and like a strong foundation to build on because you can't. You can't build a castle on sand, so you need. You need to. And you need that. Really. You know that strong tech base, tech stack base. And then we were able to build on that and integrate and plug things in and things like, oh wow. OK, things that this could really work now because I always believe and this isn't in any disrespectful way, but you know it's rubbish in rubbish out. So if you haven't got good data or you know if things aren't sort of systems aren't talking to each other properly whatever technology you buy, it's going to be quite limited anyway, so you need to be able to kind of make sure that all the all the ends meet. If you know what I mean. So innovation was definitely number one. Number two was actually improving our team's experience because obviously all of this is about customer and that is that is, that will always remain the heart of what we're doing. But it's also the impact and improvement of our team's experience because you know, there are some contact topics that are high volume, highly repetitive. And actually what we wanted to do is remove some of that. I mean, frankly, super boring repetition. Automating like that, really routine tasks or responses. What I would consider low-hanging fruit, I suppose, and allowing the team member to have a bit more of a varied and in some cases more complex workload because actually they've got customer experience, they've got depth of customer experience, expertise, depths of this knowledge and their skill set and actually we don't need them answering. You know how making up, but like, you know, 100 tickets a day on where's my order for example?

Paul Morrison

Yes.

SJ

So and I think they also because of and as a result of that that then moved the biggest focus on to the human connection piece which is again was our phone channel because if you've got if you're managing 100 cases a day on Vizmo but you know but actually what we could actually be handling more phone calls and kind of taking care of our customers more personally. So it's almost again that use of that emotional intelligence, if that makes sense.

Paul Morrison

Yes.

SJ

And then also you know by leveraging AI we could actually close on Christmas Day and close on New Year's Day and give, I know it sounds silly but to also give our teams a better work life balance too, you know.

Paul Morrison

Right.
That's brilliant.

SJ

And then yeah, I think it's been fantastic. We've been a 365 customer service function for many, many years and it's only been in the last two that we've actually been able to be a 360 business, which has been lovely.

And then scalability as well. Finally, and I know this brought a lot of people say this with their AI, but you know we have three I would say from a service perspective at least we have three peak trading spikes a year. It's the summer Black Friday and then the Black Friday and then the continued Christmas period and then and then it's that Big Peak which is the recovery afterwards, I always call it a hangover. You know the hangover in kind of January and into early February.

And then also scalability in terms of, you know as the business grows?

Our function, service and service levels need to be scalable with it essentially so that those will cut. That was the rationale behind looking into AI. How can you know what? What can we achieve by doing this and what are the key drivers you know to do this as well? And the scalability leads into being able to take care of customers better, of course. So you know, scalability means the customers don't have to wait for, you know, 5-6 business days to get a reply there waiting for sort of half of that you know.

Paul Morrison

Yeah.
Right.

SJ

So it really helps us elevate our service to our customers too.

Paul Morrison

So there's a there's a load of different roads leading in this direction a lot, a lot of maybe expectation or opportunity on the table and I think I took away from that. There's this sense that there's a window after recent technology upgrades where you could innovate. I'd take away the fact that this is obviously for the customer, but it's massively empowering and beneficial for the colleagues and the team.

As well. So there's all sorts of different interplays there, so lots, lots of riding on it. So. So where did you start? What have you? How did you do it?

SJ

Oh, goodness. Well, I think once, once we'd agreed internally that we were AI is definitely what we need to be doing. We need to be taking that step. It was very much about who do we speak to, you know, and I think we went on a few recommendations, I think word of mouth really important. And I think we're, you know, other partners and colleagues that we know in the industry have had experiences with different AI partners. We narrowed that down to three.

And we went through like a, you know, a proper sort of scoping.

Procurement process.

And at the end, we actually partnered with Digital Genius who have just been absolutely incredible since day one.

They specialize in e-commerce retail, so their solution and product is specific for you know it's like specific for the use case that we're looking at essentially. But they also had a really a great maturity in the space.

Paul Morrison

Yes. Yep.

SJ

And I know this sounds silly, but they're also just really lovely people. Like, I think that really makes such a difference of partnerships this year, but also with similar values and priorities to us. So we ended up partnering with Digital Genius after going through sort of that sort of selection process and the approach was we were very, we were very quickly coming towards peak in 2023. We were hurtling towards it at a rate of knots and we were like right, we need to take the panic.

Paul Morrison

Yeah.

SJ

Out of peak because peak scales so much for us.
And you know, we were like, right, we need to go further. The top contact drivers first, we just need to bring turn down the volume a little bit if you like. So we pick topics that would be easily automated and easily resolved because the one thing we weren't looking to do was to deflect. I don't want to just push a customer away. I think that's an awful experience and I don't think it's something that we should be inherently proud of. You know, there is an element of deflection, but I what I really wanted was.

Contact driver focus, but the things that could be automated and resolved with minimal human intervention, and there's going to be obviously fringe cases where some things may be a bit more complex and it needs to come through to a team member. And that's absolutely fine. So that was the that was the number one we needed to pick, OK, which contact drivers are we going for then we needed to think, OK, what channel do we want to go live with first for automation now.

There is, I think, a bit of debate on which channel that should be.

And we went for the one typical AllSaints style. That was a little bit different and we went for chat bot first because chat bot is 24 is visible 24/7. It's a visible available service and that's something that we wanted to give back to our customer because prior to COVID actually we'd always been a 24/7 365 customer service team.

And post COVID, we were happy that we needed to change that. So what? The first thing I wanted to do and my team and we, you know internally stakeholders agreed. That we needed to kind of have this visible service available. So chatbot first 24/7 visible service and then focus on those topics which were Wiz Mo. So where's my order and where's my return now? The reason this was so highly automated and easy to automate and in most cases a high resolution rate is because you could connect directly into carrier partners for real time updates.

Which in nine times out of 10 would give the customer exactly the information that they need.

So we did that first. Then we added in a few more topics to the chat bot that again were easily automated.

And and then we moved on to e-mail automation. Now e-mail automation is definitely a little bit more complicated because you can't apply blanket automation to all of your emails. But we did it on a narrow set of topics and again saw kind of a very high success rate and a resolution rate as well, which was fantastic.

So that really top line, that was the process and that was basically phase one and phase two.

Then we moved into. Well, I think let me just rewind a bit. All of that was built on a Myro board. So all of this that we might bless her, our global manager Maria Madonna's an Angel because she and like, she lived in the Matrix for a few months because she'd have these massive screens and she'd have all of these.

Paul Morrison

Huh.

SJ

All of these processes and when she was like we're planning through all of them and she had to map everything out including out including.

If this, then this and then this response, and it was incredible what she built. But everything we did to begin with was process mapped AI now in June last year we were we launched generative AI. So this is different. So this isn't process map di. This is sort of more natural conversational AI sort of and that's actually been incredibly successful as well. It's actually that has helped us improve.

Our resolution rates, it's reduced our handover rates, not that they were high, but they we reduced them a little bit further.

So I guess the approach is a long winded answer, but the approach was very much phased very much controlled. We stopped, we stopped innovating and stopped.

Paul Morrison

Yes.

SJ

At just before peak and we rode peak through peak was the perfect litmus test. There's no better test than putting volume through something and then the good news and you know, digital genius have been incredible and they still are today is that they will work through all of those little niggles with you and you know and we can resolve, we could resolve issues on fly which is fantastic.

Paul Morrison

Yeah.

SJ

And then the fact we're still in phases of release with AI at the moment we've, we've launched generative of said, we're looking at automating other processes and other areas. We're looking for small efficiencies for team and customer. And then I think the final phase we will need to work on is looking at how we can use AI to be almost like a virtual selling assistant for a customer.

Online. So to be able to give someone.

You know, we'll never. Yeah, but we'd never be able to replace. Like, when you go into one of our stores, I love going into our stores because I just love their energy and their passion for the product. And they're just really passionate about their customers. And you know, you they'll style you with an inch of your life, you know, which is just amazing. And they know everything about the product. Now we we're never going to be able to replace that, but at least we could try and we could try.

Paul Morrison

Recommendations.

SJ

And capture that a little bit. Try and bottle it. And I'd love to be able to use AI to help a customer online be like oh.

Now I'm going on holiday in a few weeks and you know I'm looking for XYZ and then, you know, the service bot would be able to help them. And if we know that customer, if they're known to us, we might know what size they normally buy and we can actually give them really personalized recommendations. That's where I'd love to get to. So that's the approach at the moment, if that all it all makes sense.

Paul Morrison

It makes a lot of a lot of sense, absolutely. And there's a lot to lots to dig into there, and I'm just interested. So you started in a phased approach. You were saying you brought more of a Gen AI functionality in in the in a later phase. What would some of the use cases that that you focused on in the in the later phase with Gen AI?

SJ

Mm hmm.

Well, Gen AI was more of a basically we used that FAQs and our help center as a bit of a controlled area for the generative AI to use to give it a data, a data point. So for example you know a customer might want to naturally write do you sell gift cards in Canadian dollars for example? And if it was a process map day I it would give it would give an answer but it would be quite.

Not robotic, but a little bit more rigid than.

You know, generative AI would be able to, you know, the software that we have would be able to look into our help center and the information that we've provided and would be able to utilize that and make and have a conversation with a customer based on the facts that are in that help center, if that makes sense. So that that's kind of how we've that's how we have used Gen AI. So it's almost every FA all of our help center topics.

Paul Morrison

Yes.
Yes.

SJ

Could be answered using generative AI. Now with that comes a great responsibility, as you know, because obviously generative AI.

Has got quite a bit of poetic license, which we had to which we had to work with digital genius again, we're fantastic with this is, you know, really put some guardrails and boundaries in there of things that absolutely cannot be discussed or questions that cannot be answered and things like that, you know, just to avoid.

Paul Morrison

Yes.
Yes. Yeah.

SJ

You know, firstly incorrect information and also sort of discussing things that are non-related to topics and the guidance we've given within our help center.

Paul Morrison

Yes.
Yes, absolutely no. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that whole using Gen AI to tap into, make use of the acquired knowledge and the knowledge base and FAQs as you're saying that it's a, it's a, it's a winner, it's a really powerful and compelling use case. So that's great to hear and.

SJ

It is.

Yet do you know, I was just going to say, I mean, just in terms of like what we learned though, because actually that's one of the key points I think I would say in terms of what we've learnt and I think I actually, if Maria and I were to do this again, we would, if we would have prioritized and implemented generative AIA, little bit sooner actually because it's been very successful for us. So I think if anyone who's looking into.

Launching AII would definitely put that if you have the time. If you know it depends what time of year you're looking into it, but definitely prioritize implementing generative AI because it was just it really was.

I mean, we thought the original AI that we launched, I mean it was fantastic and it absolutely helped us so much during that period. I think we ended up with about 45,000 contacts had been had been gone through AI with a very high percentage of them being resolved, which was just amazing.

Paul Morrison

Right.

That's great. That's great. I think a lot of people, sorry yesterday after you.

SJ

It do you know what?

I was just going to say, but I would say that generative AI would have made that even better. So I would definitely that is definitely a lesson learned from Maria and I's side there. I mean, I think in terms of the tools we had, the resource we had and the time we had to do it, I do. I do think we did it the right way, but I still think we probably could have started generative AI little bit sooner.

Paul Morrison

That's interesting, and that's something I hear quite a lot in terms of it's one of the few technologies where most times users the expectations are exceeded as opposed to others whether you know you're trying to make sure adoption happens and benefits are realized. But you know your advice there I think is great but I think.

SJ

Yeah.

Paul Morrison

That wasn't the end of the journey for you. You've been continuing to roll out more functionality.

We've been looking at post purchase solutions as well, so no, no rest so far.

SJ

No, no, no, no rest for us. We want to make our customers experiences as amazing as possible. So it never stops over here. So yeah, so we successfully launched AI as we know and then we moved very swiftly on to post purchase experience. So for those that maybe haven't heard of that before, you know we essentially what we're doing is anything after the customer has checked out, we wanted to partner with someone.

And we've we chose Parcel Lab who we actually went live with on the 31st of October.

Again, another incredible partner.

And essentially what we want to do is make sure the order status experience these are the wizmo, the wizma, the lay, you know, generation of labels, the let the returns process itself and all of the proactive communication in between was elevated because it was actually an area that we haven't focused on before.

The and the and the approach was.

You know.

I wanted to have our own order tracking page because how it worked prior to going live with Parcel Lab was that every customer that clicked on a tracking link was sent to our carrier's website. So it's some, it's an experience that we didn't own, it wasn't branded, it wasn't on our website. We were sending. We were sending our customers somewhere else and then kind of not really giving them away home, if you know, back to allsaints.com.

And it was, you know, their interface.
You know their layout. You know, it was. It didn't feel like AllSaints and the same for the returns experience as well. They would click on a link and that would take them to, you know, a carrier.

Branded portal and they would have to go through that carry experience. So what we wanted to do just as a first step was to have an allsaints.com sort of forward slash, you know order tracking or delivery tracking which was just on our website and it was just put in your order number put in your post code and it will bring up all your order details including what you bought, whether it was a split shipment or not.

Paul Morrison

Hmm.

SJ

Complex, not very branded to like, really slick, really easy to use. Highly adopted. We've had great feedback from that. And then equally the returns experience you know, rather than clicking in and going into you know a carrier branded portal. Again we just wanted to make it absolutely as simple and it's easy and painless as possible for our customer. Just put in your order number put in your e-mail address and it will bring up your returns. It'll bring up your order information. Just click the ones you know.

This all sounds like ABC, but it's ABC, you know, but that we didn't have, you know. So it's like, you know, click on click on the product that you need to return. Tell us why load up a picture if you want to. If you want to write any notes about the order let us know and then click here and we'll generate that. Either the labels generated or AQR Code's generated so you know the returns experience for a customer went from being quite painful. We did get experience. We did get feedback about it and I'm really pleased that we could do something about it for our customers without our God. This is a really long winded.

Paul Morrison

Yeah.

SJ

It's really painful experience and now you know if, as long as you've got your order, order number and your e-mail address. I mean it should be done in less than a minute. So and we've had some great feedback for that too. So that was two elements of it. The other element of Postpa. Sorry, go on. No, go on.

Paul Morrison

Yes, yes.
That's. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. And so you've taken a painful, painful part of the process that was labor intensive and no fun for any involved. And you've sort of automated that and I mean can you learn can you dig into the does it generate any other insights or any other connections or.

SJ

Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.

Paul Morrison

What? What other value can you get from that?

SJ

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, that so there's a few things that firstly, you're driving track it, you're right, driving traffic back to your website. So you're driving Sessions back to your site, which are really valuable traffic, you know, so we were sending, you know, think how many you know for some businesses, how many hundreds of thousands of returns are there every year and imagine sending all of that traffic somewhere else.

And not back to your site. So it's there is a commercial element to.

Paul Morrison

Yes.

SJ

Post purchase as well and it has, you know, sort of with, you know, conversion rates for that traffic coming back to you. But the other element of it is proactive communication which actually helps reduce where's my order, where's my return queries? And this is the, this is the very powerful bit as well. So at the you know before we implement a parcel lab, our customers would get an order confirmation.

A dispatch confirmation and then they wouldn't hear a thing from us until it landed on their doorstep, which that drove contact because people like, well, where is it? You know, if it if normally if normally a customer is used to getting it in a day or two and then because maybe we're in peak, it's taking, I don't know, three or four days.

Paul Morrison

Hmm.

SJ

It's my order. This is really unusual, but then that you know that poor customers had to reach out to us when they didn't really need to, because if we'd actually just proactively said to them or you know, hey, Paul, thanks for your order. Just to let you know, this is the estimated delivery day we never would have heard from that customer or you know in most cases. And so it's actually a better experience for them. So you know we've got a suite of sort of proactive emails that we're using to keep our customers updated to let them know that it's been picked up.

Paul Morrison

Yes.

SJ

To let them know that it's in transit and it's landed in. I don't know South end and it's going to be with you between this time and this time, but it's all branded.

And it's every link in there sort of leads back to allsaints.com as well as with the customers always got sort of a way home. And then equally the opposite, which is the returns experience because you know again a customer would go on to this carrier branded portal, they would go through the returns process, they'd go and drop it off and then they wouldn't hear a thing until they're refunded been confirmed. So again, we just really wanted to plug in those gaps for our customers, so we,

Paul Morrison

Hmm.

SJ

let a customer know. Hi, Paul, you know that's been you know, we can see that you've dropped that offer at the post office.

Paul, just to let you know it's on route back to us up. We've got it look out for your refund confirmation in the next few days and do you know what we've seen about a 20% reduction in Wismo and wizma contact alone just from going live since and that's year on year.

Paul Morrison

OK.

That's great. I love what you're talking about there in terms of the, the experience and the fact that because it works in this elevated, improved way, you're going to improve the experience, you're going to reduce churn, you're going to improve loyalty and there's going to be a real to the top line impact of this sort of improved quality of experience. So it's really, really exciting.

SJ

So it's been really significant.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that links back to one of the key things I said about what sort of experiencing we're trying to experience. We're looking to create for AllSaints because I do genuinely believe customers having trust and confidence in you isn't just whether they've got someone at the end of a phone who can answer the question they need, but it's also do they know where their order is? Do they feel secure that that, you know, do they feel communicated with even if something goes wrong? Like if even if something's delayed, if we just let that customer know that this.

Paul Morrison

None.

SJ

And a few days later, you know, at least they've been updated proactively and they haven't had to come and you know, so I do think that builds on the trust and confidence piece, which then leads into sort of loyalty and lifetime value. And you know, and really, you know.

You know, increasing our customers likelihood to keep shopping with us because really, you know the customers have you know I think one bad experience customers generally are maybe a little bit you know a bit forgiving you know particularly if they love the brand. But I think if you start getting into two, three experiences where you think well that wasn't handled very well or they didn't proactively tell me that. All right. You know if you don't feel them with confidence when shopping with you, then I think that's when we can lose customers. So that was why we had a big focus on post purchase.

Paul Morrison

Exactly.

Exactly. No, it's that's great. That's really interesting to hear. I'm looking at the clock. Amazingly, we've blasted through our time. So maybe just one last quick question just to sort of look at the horizon, you know what's next or where you know where is this taking retailer like AllSaints where's next?

SJ

Well, I think I think AI is particularly so in terms of next steps. You know, I think AI will continue to be a phased implementation because I think that it's ever evolving, it's becoming more intuitive. It's becoming more well adopted and I really it's becoming that natural Co-pilot. So I do think that there will continue to be opportunities with AI within customer experience.

So I think that will be ongoing. I think post purchase we are in, we have released phase one.

Which was our UK and US sites and we are now working on our European and rest of World website. So they have exactly the same. They'll have the order tracking pages, they will have the returns portal and label generation. They will have all the proactive emails that go with it. And then again post purchase, technically it's not just a system. You know I think it's a strategy in itself. So it will be the next phases of that.

Paul Morrison

We'll have to check in again in six months for a year just to see to see what latest developments you've had. I have to close the call there. I mean really appreciate your time yesterday for a great, great discussion and I look forward to reconnecting and thanks to you, our listeners for joining retail and consumer pulse today. If you've enjoyed the show, please do like and follow us and stay tuned for our next episode. So thanks and goodbye.

SJ

Of course. Thank you.

Paul Morrison

Thanks SJ, that was great. I mean, we just hard up against the hour now. I had to had to end the. No, no, no, no, no, it's you're absolutely natural. It's really perfect sort of material and really, really interesting. So yeah, so you're not going to, you're going to take a proper break then in a few weeks or not really.

SJ

I know. I'm sorry. I told you we didn't. We're not talking.