- Derek O’Carroll
- CEO at Brightpearl
Bio:
Derek O’Carroll has had an eye for business since he turned his school’s unused tennis courts into a paid tennis club as a 15-year-old. As CEO of Brightpearl, a cloud-based ERP for retailers and wholesalers, he has refined go-to-market strategies and led innovations that have increased deal size of nearly 500 percent and yielded 75% growth year-on-year.
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Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of The Business of eCommerce. I talk with Derek O’Carroll about how to create a customer focused omnichannel experience. This is a business of e-commerce. Episode 106 to The Business of eCommerce to show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Charles Palleschi. I’m here today with Derek O’Carroll. Derek is a CEO of BrightPearl, a cloud based ERP are retailers and wholesalers at bright Pearl. He has redefined the go to market strategy and led innovations that have increased the deal size. We 500% in yield at a 75% growth year over year. I’ve asked Eric on the show today to chat about how you create a customer focused Omni channel experience. So Hey Derek, how you doing today?
Derek: 00:50 I’m excellent. Charles. Delighted to be with you. Yeah,
Charles: 00:52 To have you on the show. I’d love the topic, kind of the whole omnichannel and kind of bringing it all together first real quick, bright Pearl. You’ve been there. How long?
Derek: 01:01 A three and a half years. Just over. I joined in May, 2016
Charles: 01:05 Gotcha. Okay. And cloud based ERP. So for those who don’t know, I feel like years ago I feel like this, the term ERP was just this thing that like other people had. But then as you kind of grow and you don’t really know what it is, you know, like I don’t need one of those. But as you grow, you start to realize maybe you know, you start to learn what it is and kind of realize who needs it and why. Can you explain real quick, who needs an ERP? What is it and kind of generally like how does it work?
Derek: 01:34 Well, I think to be successful, any merchant needs to provide a very high level of personalized service irrespective of the channel that they are using to engage with a client. That’s, that’s where everything starts. And in order to be able to do that, you have to orchestrate all of the operational tasks that come about when an, when an order hits your store through a point of sale, hits your marketplace through maybe an Amazon store, you’re running our hits your website through your own website. And so retail ERP our cloud based ERP as you called it, essentially the way I would ask your listeners think about it is it’s essential point to orchestrate all of your orders and all of the following on actions that you need to bring to bear upon those orders to get to the bottom line where you can see the Holy grail of what’s my margin, what’s my fully landed cost on each channel. And you need to know that because then you can decide how much do I order for the next season or the next phase. And also what’s my pricing strategy in that particular channel? Cause as we know, every single channel has a different cost of doing business on it. And that’s essentially what an ERP does. So it covers where people order from, how you handle that order it overs, fulfillment, logistics, payments, all the way through. So just think of the life cycle of a customer and then think of all the tasks needed to serve that.
Charles: 03:00 Yeah, I’m always surprised so many retailers once you start delving, once you go channel, right? So if you’re just telling your basic story of a couple products, you know it’s you shipping them from one place, it’s pretty obvious your costs. But as soon as you expand beyond that, just kind of how it all ties together. You talked a lot of retail and they just kind of say, I know, I know I’m making money, but I’m not really sure what channel and how much. And it’s almost just like guesstimate and at the end of the month they just look at the bank count and Oh, it has more money than last month. I must be making money. But it’s very, they don’t know exactly what products, what channels. So it’s one of those things that I think a lot of folks suffer from this. Once you start getting a little larger,
Derek: 03:38 I think once you go beyond about a million dollars GMV and you either need to look for a [inaudible], where am I growth opportunities, I need to open up in other marketplaces. So you consider maybe going into Amazon or opening it up with Walmart or you might consider, Hey, we’ve got a cool product, let’s open up inside the United States and let’s focus in Germany for example. And the key to that through the planning says is don’t do that unless you understand, well, what are the costs going to be and how quickly can you get the product to the target customer? And it is amazing how many operations out there mature companies that have been around for a while. And also the, the sort of more assertive digital natives for want a better about a better expression. They need to bridge that gap and they need to understand what the cost is going to be. And the place to start is actually at the customer because it obviously starts on what type of service you want to offer because that’s going to impact the type of cost that you’re going to bear. But it’s amazing how many people just don’t have any systems in place and no real clue about where their margin is coming from.
Charles: 04:39 Yeah, it’s one of those things. I was talking to retail a while back and they do a lot of international and then the, I forget what country, it was some somewhere in Europe where all of a sudden it went from, you know, like a single digit percentage import tax to like 35%. So like just that it went from being like highly profitable to highly unprofitable but just in this one country and unless you really see that you could completely miss that or easily.
Derek: 05:02 Well you’ve got that on the international side and then you’ve got the oversee the, the ever changing landscape on the U S sales tax side as well, which is obviously another saw, another area of unknowns. And that’s why you need solutions like Avalara or tax jar to get a handle on that. But the other element as well on sales channels and the and how the cost changes over time. Like a lot of our customers use Amazon, but Amazon are masters at changing their charge structure and their pricing mechanism and getting a handle on that at a systemize levels. So you can see what changes are new, what’s the year on year comparison with regards to changes in my pain more in my pain, less getting that level of granularity is really important for merchants who want to be serious about getting to the 10 and the 50 and the a hundred million GMV Mark below, below a million. You don’t need any ERP solution. You can, you can just put this together like with a nice Shopify or big commerce store, plug it into zero and then just manage everything through spreadsheets. It’s only when you get into scale and complexity that it just becomes untenable in terms of the time of hours that you need to spend. And obviously the key thing back to the point on customers is you end up doing manual tasks and with manual tasks comes error and with error comes a pissed off customers.
Charles: 06:18 Yeah. And what ends up most people is they kind of just don’t do it. They kind of just like, Oh I guess at that point, right? So you kind of see people that under a million that kind of just essentially still guessing. But once you get over that, if you’re off, that being off matters a lot more. Right. So being off by a couple percentage really moves the needle.
Derek: 06:36 Correct. Yeah. And, and a lot of co a lot of people at that realm of a million up to even a 5 million. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve come across companies that have sort of cobbled it together and then now they want to get to the next level. So the, this visibility, but they rely upon individuals to keep it all in their heads and spreadsheets and those individuals work crazy hours. And the problem with that is if you get any massive change in your business, maybe at a peak time or an unknown time, you’re going to burn out and introduce the error factor, which results we know into poor customer experience.
Charles: 07:07 Gotcha. So when we say customer focused omni-channel, right? First, I guess if, if someone’s been hiding under a rock for the past week, you know, five, 10 years, let’s define omni-channel, but then kind of, let’s go into the whole customer focused part of that.
Derek: 07:22 Yeah. So omni-channel, it just, it’s multichannel. It’s, it’s having the ability to buy a product in the physical and virtual world in different ways. Whether it’s direct in physical or through a wholesaler or online direct or through a marketplace are be able to sell the same product skew, but with a different branding across all channels. So automatically that, that that’s essentially what it means. And then customers, from a customer perspective, the complexity kicks in when they go, okay, I’m going to buy from multiple channels, but I want the same level of service. I want you to remember me the same irrespective of what channel I get into and engage with your brand. And if you don’t treat me in the same way, I’m going to, you’re going to erode empathy, which is the precursor to trust, which is obviously the key to lifetime value. So that’s the, that’s the complexity that sits on omni-channel. It’s a great term, but when you apply it to the expectation of the customers, the cost start mounting, because to offer that same level of service, you need to have a cloud based solution in place that’s helping you automate all of the complexities that arise there. But that’s what Omni channel means. From my perspective.
Charles: 08:35 Do you mainly see customers buying at retail point of sale and then coming online? Or is this, when you say the cost, the same customer of different channels, is this literally like a Shopify store and an Amazon or is this point of sale and then your direct store?
Derek: 08:51 So we’ve got three profiles of customers that come to one is the online only. So digital natives, whatever you want to call them, they don’t have any stores. They typically set up the business in the last five to six years. They’ve got a really cool product and they’re focused on global expansion through all digital channels. That’s, that’s probably one of our, that’s our primary channel at the moment. The second one, which is growing year over year is the more established bricks and mortar. Maybe they have three, four 50 stores and they can see that customers are asking for a, I want to have an experience online or I want to be able to buy online and drop off in store or pickup in store. That’s the second category. And then the third category is the large corporates like very large companies that have legacy systems that have been in place for years and they need to move quickly.
Derek: 09:46 And what they’re doing is sort of segmenting out the whole area of online and working with companies like bro Pearl to plug that into their legacy systems to, to sort of get halfway there. Obviously there’s, there’s great expense there, but then there are the three types of customers that we see. And it’s interesting in the U S we see more brands that are direct to consumer, you know, cool products on the money and really going after it and establishing very strong lifetime value with the customers. And then on the international side we see a higher degree of complexity requirements coming in the door. So when, when companies that are trading international or working in Europe for example, they do tend to have a much higher bar that they’re trying to get to in terms of solution complexity. And I think that’s just down to the markets they operate in. But that’s, that’s probably the profile coverage that we see.
Charles: 10:41 Got it. So now let’s say someone is selling their brand, selling direct to consumer or just coming in, what, what are some ways they can start hitting multichannel and using that across the same consumers to raise kind of the lifetime value of, of those buyers?
Derek: 10:59 Right. So, so I think the first thing where I see success, so, so as opposed to my opinion where I’ve seen brands sort of blow up, knock it out of the park, is they don’t come to us initially with technical requirements. They come to us with the customer life cycle journey or the customer journey that they want their client to experience. And they come to us with very well thought through brand values. Even small companies do this. And we see this in combination with someone in that team who has got very strong shall we say operational experience. And then the second thing that they do is to say, here’s the customer experience we want to offer. And then here is what we think the operational workflows for want of a better expression need to be to make that experience a reality.
Derek: 11:49 So for example, having a single source of truth and having the ability to always track customer history in terms of their engagement with you, what they buy, where they buy, what channels. So you can always focus on that data in a responsible manner, in certain markets as per the requirements. And and out of those two lenses come the technical specifications. So when a lot of times we see customers coming to us our prospects and they have a long, long list of technical stuff that they want to achieve. And we sit down with them and say, well, that’s great, but can we have a look at what the customer requirements are and what experience you want to light up? Because, and we do that because technology is not, it’s not the whole solution. You need to have the technology with the people side of the equation and the brand experience that’s really crucial and that’s really important for direct to consumer brands. So digital natives, they really nail that. Less less obvious is the more established bricks and mortar brands. They don’t come to us with the requirements around customer experience. They come with more technical requirements on distributed order management, automated accounting, whatever it is. So we see success being derived when brands started the customer and map out that journey and then spend time to link it to the ops requirements that then links to the spec requirements for a technology provider like bright pro.
Charles: 13:21 So let’s say I’m a brand, I’m sitting out there, I’m listening and I want to kind of focus more on that kind of customer experience. But I haven’t really thought through what that should be like. What are some examples of just different things that have been successful and where you’d even recommend someone gets sided when they want to kind of think through that customer journey, interacting with your brand?
Derek: 13:40 Well, the first thing is for that. So let’s assume that the person understands who their target pro profile is, who the customer is, what the core, what the cohort is so to speak, and where, what it is that they use to identify with a brand. So what are the empathy points? So for example obviously you’ve got to have a cool, cool product that resonates, but what are the things that you’re going to do that differentiate above the product? So for example, we’re going to offer the basics of free returns or we’re going to be known for [inaudible]. The term is omni-channel return. So being able to buy online and pickup in store. So these are called sort of nonfunctional differentiators that are above and beyond the product and then really get very clear on what that is going to be.
Derek: 14:33 And then you actually move from there. So a couple of brands that do that really well are companies like Trafigura, a brand, companies like trophy in South America. They are very, very strong on building that sort of brand journey. And one of their brands is a range of spandex for, for ladies and their success in the global market. It has been built out about their maniacal focus on that customer journey and then linking it back to the operational requirements. But at a simple level, it’s the same level of service in all channels. That’s what they’re offering. Now. They’re a digital native company, but a coming to mind, they would be a great example of, of that on direct to consumer. And then on B to B, someone like a grower’s house out of Arizona they specialize in providing the equipment hydroponics equipment for, for, for growing all sorts of product and those guys focus on product range availability, cost of delivery. So it’s much sort of, it’s more about the B2B journey for them. And both those customers would obviously use a hybrid platform, buy like Bri pro. And, and that’s important today. Any platform that you use on an operational basis needs to handle not only all the multiple markets, but it’s gotta be direct to consumer capable, but also be to be capable that that’s crucial because you need that flexibility.
Charles: 15:59 Yeah. I feel like that’s one of those things that people overlook what the whole B2B it’s one of those things you start off direct to consumer and it works great, but if you can get any kind of B2B sales going there, this is like once they go, it’s this fantastic magical thing that happens. I see so many people just overlooking that completely or folks focused 100% on that. But realize that you can kind of bridge the gap of doing some B to B. And the nice part with that is a lot, it’s reoccurring. They’ll just put in large orders. A lot of folks just ignore that or focus 100% on it. I kind of found,
Derek: 16:32 Yeah, no, I, I think the, the, the emergence of hybrid merchants that are really working to, I’d say bifurcate their strategies so they go, okay, we’re direct to consumer in our market where we are home. So we’re in the U S we’re direct to consumer and they might then deploy a B2B strategy and international markets in combination with checking out a marketplace strategy through something like Amazon or leveraging Amazon’s B2B marketplace, which is, which is a big, big area to look at for that potential. Growth. As long as you understand the costs and are in a position to understand the cost, that’s key. But you’re absolutely right. I mean, that hybrid flexibility is crucial. And you know, we’ve been on a 10 year bull run in the markets and any retailer’s going to be thinking about, Ooh, when’s it going to land? And we, we continually have this chat with customers about being recession ready.
Derek: 17:29 Probably in the last, at a year, year and a half. It hasn’t happened yet. Everything’s going really good. But to be recession ready, you’ve gotta be super flexible. Being able to do what you just said very quickly, open up a B2B channel or a market based channel in another country and leverage all your investments just to get more sales in the door. And, and then second thing is to invest in tech. So you’re not subject to the, you know, when you get peak trades, you have to hire a bunch of people to serve that trade. So it’s people who are, have a high degree of automation in their business model. They are also in combination to what you said, sort of getting ready for being recession proof. A lot of my clients are worried about that.
Charles: 18:10 Yeah, we’re definitely hearing more of that. It’s odd. It’s almost been a year now and they keep talking about, and it hasn’t come, but everyone’s kinda like on edge. Yeah.
Derek: 18:18 Yeah. Was binding. They’re biting their fingernails. But I think it’s just a sit down. Any owner just sit down and say, okay, well what are we going to do if that happens in sales tank by 40%. And a lot it’s just human nature not to do that. But I’m seeing more and more of our clients sort of looking at that. And anyone who’s subject to, you know, they, if they look at their call space and they’ve got a high percentage of people in the back office, there are subject to, if they’re successful, their margin gets eroded cause they have to hire more people. But if and they have the higher error rate, but then if they have to let people go, it’s knowledge that leaves the door. And that knowledge back to your earlier point is like all the nuance stuff that the in those people’s heads and that’s another risk as well. So yeah, it’s I’m just hearing that a lot. Gotta be recession proof.
Charles: 19:10 Yeah, it’s a, so it sparks for me, we actually have a bright Pearl connection and kind of help with automation there. And that’s one of the things that it scales right? Where you have your base price, but as you know, order flows coming in, it’s, you know, if you tax order flow, the cost doesn’t tax right on a lot of these things. And that’s kind of the beauty of this automation that you have the cost to install it, but it doesn’t go up from there. And there’s a floor Octo. So
Derek: 19:39 Yeah, I mean the cost per order drops obviously as the vote as the volume goes up. And I think the other aspect is that the, the labor market and the amount of attrition in the labor market that is inherent in merchants, you know, the very high levels of attrition, 27 to 30%, depending upon which country you look at. And and in particular people who are not using or who are using, where has, you know, their own warehouse and that’s even a higher risk. So that’s a big area that we ask our clients to focus on to get super efficient Explorer, drop shipping, understand the cost, what Amazon may be, use FBA in certain markets, whatever. Because that’s very high attrition. And when people leave, they take the knowledge and then the new people come in and then you’ve got to train them up on all the processes that you’re running to keep your customers happy.
Charles: 20:31 What would you recommend out there? Let’s say someone sit in the head order is kind of coming in for a while, but they’re building this customer list, but they don’t really know the lifetime value of any given customer. They don’t have any sort of segmentation, so they don’t really know, Hey, you know, orders coming from X are, did a lifetime value. These customers, they’re coming back 10 X to commit to our Amazon customers that may just have this one. So then it’s over. Where would someone start to kind of start pulling that data together and to get that view of how customers are actually interacting with their brand.
Derek: 21:04 So I would say you’re talking about smaller customers just starting out, just starting off. Are you,
Charles: 21:09 It’s, I feel like I’ve seen some relatively large retail is that turning over, you know, a lot of orders, but they kinda just coming in and they’re not really looking at, they just looking at each order, but not at a customer level. And it kind of see that as a kind of this common thing. They’re looking at order level, but not customer level. What does the ones start with that?
Derek: 21:28 So you, you need to have the customer at the center of old records. So by design that needs to be your outcome. If you’re large and you’re over $1 million, well then you need to talk to someone like broil obviously. Cause that’s what we do. But if you’re a small and you’re just starting out, I would recommend something like a big commerce or Shopify, one of the easily customizable stores plugged into cause it’s obviously just going to be a single channel and you could plug something in to that, like maybe glue reporting or there’s a whole bunch of reporting tools out there that are very easy to plug into the data source that Shopify builds up. And then you’d be able to get a picture. The complexity arises when you need to start serving Omni channel and when you need to start looking at history and all of the scale issues that come about that and payments and all of that sort of stuff.
Derek: 22:20 But if you just below a million, I would get a big commerce store or Shopify store and plug it into a something like glue and you’ll start lighting up those types of like call them key KPIs and then if you’re bigger you need to have a distributed order management solution or a cloudy or P as you call it. There’s all sorts of terminologies out there. We actually just stayed, we define ourselves as a retail ops platform or a retail operation platform, a single place to do all that sort of stuff. But yeah, that, that’s what I would recommend. And those tools have become very capable in the last three years. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been looking at it, but business analytics or AI or whatever you want to call it, it’s just, it’s had so much private VC money into us in the last three, four years. Those products are all now out there and really powerful at giving you insights from a data perspective.
Charles: 23:12 Got it. I want to go back to what you said a moment ago about kind of the warehousing. Are you seeing, you see a lot of folks run their own warehouse or go into a three PL or using something like FBA, like what are people doing? Kind of like the idea too of using different warehousing, right? Cause you see a lot of folks, they’re either all or none, right? That you know, I’m going to build my warehouse or I’m going to go to this, you know, three PL. But the truth is you can have a lot of these different things and kind of glue them together where they make sense. What do you kind of see there?
Derek: 23:44 Well I think what we, our customers is have a strategy that enables flexibility either for periods of growth or periods I E demand or periods of decline, recession-proof as we said. And there’s the three sort of areas. There’s sort of four options. You can have your three PLS and we see much more three PL penetration in the U S markets than we do in in AMEA. We see it in AMEA, like it’s obviously a very popular service that people sign up to, but it’s really, it’s, it’s, it’s very heavily used and penetrated in the U S we also see, I think it’s around the single market lens and the fact that three PLS in the U S have just established with more coverage and scale. Whereas in Europe it’s, it’s more difficult to get scale across Europe. It just takes a longer time because you’re working on, you know, you’re working in the European union, but it’s still just takes longer.
Derek: 24:35 So I think that’s the, that’s the case. Some of your readers might have a might’ve point of view or business. That’s the first thing. Then then we say, okay, if that’s your primary strategy, you’re gonna use three PR. Are you looking at drop shipping and how are you going to do that? And then are you exploring either using Amazon’s FBA or Shopify as new fulfillment service that they’re will actually, they haven’t released yet, but they’re sort of talking about that and have a hybrid approach. Cause it’s all about flexibility as we said, to deal with volume and decline. And then the other option, and we do see this actually is customers take on the investment for their own warehousing. And they usually will have their own, whereas in the countries of they that they operate in, and then they augment that with Amazon FBA and other countries are a three PL and it’s a hybrid approach.
Derek: 25:29 And the key thing to your point is you need to have a centralized system that is managing and tracking all of the complexity that arises because you then need to deal with the demands of the customer because they might buy a product and then there’s a return. And then you’ve got to process that return account for then deal with the customer in a, in a, in a responsible manner to maintain your reviews or refurbish that product for resale and another brand in another channel. So that’s where, when you get into the real, the real nuts and bolts of it. Now we, we do offer an integrated WMS solution that just comes part of our solution. But it’s really aimed at the sort of customers between 1 million and 20 million and beyond 20 million. You get into a whole bunch of complexity in the warehouse and we recommend third parties WMS. Let’s define that. That’s warehouse management system. So basically a solution that allows the people that walk around the warehouse go to the right spot, pick a product and make sure it’s got the right label and it gets shipped or vice versa if that product gets returned from a customer.
Charles: 26:33 Yeah, I feel like what a lot of people miss because a lot of people I do in this kind of hybrid with drop shipping their own warehouse saying all kinds of different things happening and what you kind of misses. You might be sending, someone might place an order and half of it comes from your warehouse, half comes from a drop shipper, but then they might return a piece of that order. What do they ever like? What happens there
Derek: 26:54 And and and, and the key like this is the, this is the underbelly of Omni channel. This is where the darkness sits because how do you ensure that you’ve got a, an auditable record so that you can tell the customer what the state are, the process, where they are in the process, but more importantly for re for retailers love, what’s the cost of that and, and how are you recording that cost and how are you using that to negotiate better? Three PL rates are to fight the Amazon FBA bill. Good luck with us. You know, so you’re absolutely right. That’s where the complexity sits and that’s where the customer experience back to our discussion earlier on being a, having a very clear view on what you’re capable of in terms of the experience that you want to offer your customers. You know, be very careful of taking on too much because this is this underbelly of complexity that sits underneath. You’ve got to get, get really good in one channel, get ready to good in another, but you know, go slow to go fast almost for the, your smaller companies that are listening.
Charles: 27:59 Yeah. Is that kind of what you’d recommend there to help? I don’t know how to help alleviate this problem cause I feel like you can, there’s 99% of orders that kind of get the order, send it out, customer’s happy, everything’s great. But there’s this percent of orders that it’s a split order. It comes from different places, half of it gets returned and then at that point you don’t even know, do we make money with this order? Do we use money? Like how much? Like you have literally no idea what happened, like what the financials are. Or even sometimes, like you said, how do even get those products back into stock? Because now can you resell them? Are they hot as some refer? Like what happens there?
Derek: 28:34 Any kind of, when you say, yeah, you say 99, 99%. But what is that percent, I guess would be a better question. Well, in certain sectors it’s like 35% and in fashion it’s 40% and it goes even higher. If you’re selling to younger, younger prospects or younger customers, 40% that are just happy and donors and they say, Oh, well no, sorry, 60% are happy. Okay. And 40% go into the return cycle. And some of the luxury brands, they get all sorts of challenges around a return serial returners. And even things like Instagram fraud where people buy the product, they take a picture of themselves wearing it and then they return it. So you’ve gotta be, you’ve gotta be very analytical and have a system that it gives you real granularity to your earlier point around the customer because any system needs to have the customer and the older, very, very at its core, so to speak, and everything needs to derive from the ass.
Derek: 29:34 Because then you’re in a position to understand what is the lifetime value by cohort of a customer. And you can things like identify serial returners automatically, and then use that to drive your promotions. And you’re kind of painting through, you know, whether you’re using whatever mail champ or Clavio or whatever you’re using to, to, to drive your, your marketing campaigns. And if you have a person trying to figure all that out, you’re gonna make mistakes. Whereas if you have a a retail ops platform, that’s essentially what it’s doing. It’s creating that timely, accurate and complete record all of your customer at any time so that you can decide what you do with regard to marketing and service. But, so you’re creating your accounts in real time because that’s the other thing that Bri pro does because it’s a, any RP, it creates the journals of your accounts so you know exactly what’s costing you when, and that’s crucial for any of the larger retailers. That said, some of our smaller customers are very happy with Xero or QuickBooks and we just plug it into those journals. And off you go, you get the same outcome at the end of the day.
Charles: 30:43 Yeah. I feel like be able to target something, like you said, a sale, a serial returner. I’ve never heard that term, but I can see that happening. And you might even have an entire segment just saying, Hey, all my orders coming from Instagram have a 50% return rate versus my ones that come in direct. Maybe it’s 10%. So maybe you start to get an understanding of Ash.
Derek: 31:03 Yeah. And as long as you have the, the central record, all of those transactions, you can report on that. And that’s, that’s crucial because that drives your decision making. Okay, what’s my pricing strategy going to be and that channel, or what’s my pricing strategy going to be for that cohort of customer type, that thousand people that keep on returning stuff, what am I going to do? Because you don’t want to make the mistake of cutting them off or being punitive because you might look behind it and look at their lifetime value over the year and find out it’s seven times higher than your normal first time customer. So, and then you make a decision of, Oh, we’ve got the basis of maybe plugging in a loyalty program and going from there. So back to what we said earlier on, you know, it’s go slow to go fast as you build your optimum experience around the customer and then your operational thi requirements will become apparent.
Derek: 31:55 And that’s essentially what we do with with clients. You know, we, we scope out clients as requirements before we sign on on a contract. So we spend a huge amount of time making sure that they understand what the life cycle is on the experience, but also what the workflows are. And then we help them tease out what the requirements are and what their goals are and then we sign a contract with them. And that’s pretty unique in the market because we know this is a, as a minefield, it’s a minefield of complexity and we got ahold of our clients hands through it. So we’re it’s actually one of our major differentiators and I think one of the reasons why we’re growing so quickly.
Charles: 32:32 Got it. So before I let you go, kind of what am I take away from this? It sounds like to title back and so super is having that single source source of truth, right? Because without that, this is all kind of, you just kind of cobbling together data from different places. Is that really, is that kind of one of the biggest things you’d recommend to our retail of just making sure to have one place where they can at least pull the data from and start doing reporting, but at least collecting it to one location or where else would you kind of,
Derek: 33:03 No, no, I mean, I mean that is, it is a single source of truth and as we said earlier on, if you’re an established company, that’s going to be a challenge because you’ve got lots of existing legacy systems in place. So you need to decide, well how, what’s our path going to be to get there? And that means addressing some legacy issues and there’s there, there’s a lot of complexity around that path, but the, and that’s why some of those retailers are struggling because on the real world their costs are going up and the footfall is going down, which opens up the opportunity for the people out there that have really cool brands. And there’s a massive opportunity for those people to start with a single source of data from day one and grow from there. Because there, that’s essentially what the characteristic or anatomy of a successful merchant is today is data. It’s all about data. Amazon showed the way companies like us, bright Pearl are giving tools that emulate that capability to have a single source of data that’s timely, accurate, and complete customer centric. And if you have that profile you’re, you’re, you’re halfway there. Cause obviously you got to have a cool product and all that sort of good stuff.
Charles: 34:12 Awesome. I think that’s super helpful. People want to learn more about you, about bright girl, what can they do? So,
Derek: 34:19 Oh, just go to bright pearl.com and we’d be happy to talk to any of your listeners.
Charles: 34:23 Awesome. Thanks a lot for coming on the show today. It’s great chatting.
Derek: 34:25 Oh, thanks very much. It was a real pleasure. Cheers Charles.
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