Recap: Acclimate to the Voice of Customer Camp

Recap of Helen Yu's Ascend Your Start-Up on the critical decisions as they apply to SBH Labs.

Decision #13: Is Your Company as Customer-Centric as Your Marketing Content Says It Is?

1. Treat customers as assets. What drives gains and triggers loses? SBH Labs performance metric is the number of repeat customers and the customers that start buying the small size but move up to the largest size available.
2. Align intentionally around customer experience. How are you creating an unforgettable customer experience? SBH Labs will always side with the customer. Refunds and replacements are granted when carriers lose or misplace packages. Even though they are total loses for the business, creating that trust between customers and the brand is what makes SBH Labs stand out.
3. Build an active customer listening path. This is something new to implement for SBH Labs. An idea is to pay close attention to customer reviews and feedback to learn of new ways their products are being used.
4. Deliver consistent and reliable customer experience. This has been a pain-point for SBH Labs as there is limited freedom within Amazon.
5. Create a culture of accountability around customer experience. SBH Labs has a Customer Success Representative. However, everyone, including the owners, have the responsibility to make things right for the customer if they're the ones sitting at the desk.

Decision #14: How Will You Get to Know Your Customer?

Something SBH Labs needs to improve on is its search-ability. The company has had a slow transition off Amazon and SEO and SEM are still weak. 

Right now, SBH Labs has started looking more closely at customer reviews to segment the uses for its top-selling products in efforts to learn more about each type.

Decision #15: Are You Willing to Step Back In Order to Move Forward and Acclimate to the Voice of Your Customer?

After looking at customer feedback, it is important to take a step back and see where your strategy needs to be tweaked. One customer ordered from Amazon US to deliver to Canada. The customer paid the extra shipping needed. However, they were also asked to pay duties. SBH Labs did not know this particular customer would be charged extra fees on imports (the customer is a business) because when other non-business customers have bought from Amazon US, no complaints were ever received. This customer was upset because there was no mention on paying tariffs on international orders. Although it was not up to the business to decide who pay extra import fees, SBH Labs took this feedback into consideration, stepped back, and decided to adjust its business model to supply US orders only to avoid future issues.

Decision #16: At the End of the Day, How Will You Define Your Customer Experience?

SBH Labs focuses on health and wellness above all. Co-owners started this business with that goal in mind. For SBH Labs, wellness goes as far as customer satisfaction. In the year and a half SBH Labs has been operating, there are a few customers that have consistently ordered from the company. Some having more than 25 separate orders! SBH Labs now has to entice its Amazon customers to switch to the SBH Labs website for orders.