- Reggie Black
- CEO of Better Way Health
Show Notes:
- Customer service is in-house
- Call every new subscription
- Have a preferred customer service rep
- AOV over the phone is double
- 80% to 40% over the phone
- 3.5 to 7.5 orders once they talk on the phone
- $1,200 LTV
- 3 Months of training for Customer Service
- Started in as IT guy in 2010
- Brooks at SpringBot
- Book – Customer Service Revolution
Sponsors:
- Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!
- Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software
Bio:
Reggie Black is a Christian first, husband of 10 years to Amy, father of four (and counting), and CEO of Better Way Health.
Links:
Transcript:
Charlie (00:00):
In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Reggie black about building a culture that truly cares about the customer. This is a business e-commerce episode, one 39. Welcome to the business. E-Commerce the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. I’m your host, Chelsea [inaudible] and I’m here today with Reggie black. Reggie is a CEO of better way health, a high quality supplements company that focuses on customer service. They have a very interesting approach on calling customers and talking directly to their customers have to purchase is something I don’t have very often from eCommerce brands. So I think it’s very interesting and everyone should have a listen. So let’s get into the interview. Hey Reggie, how are you doing today? I’m wonderful. Charles, how are you? Good to, yeah, I’m doing good. Good to have you on the show. I think I’m disinteresting topic where it’s not talked about very often, right on kind of focusing you here.
Charlie (01:03):
And we do a lot right on talking to folks in on how to talking about growth and marketing and that’s how the business, but, and that’s all kind of the top, right. Of getting the customer. Well, I, they, they’re focusing on the customer after you actually acquire them after maybe as they made the purchase during the purchase process and what that looks like and how to kind of improve Ash. So I think it’s super under under talked about topic. So definitely interested on this one. So your background, so you guys CEO of better way health, you guys sell supplements, right. But I know you have a big focus on the customer service aspect of it, right?
Reggie (01:44):
Absolutely. So we, we really focus in, when I took over the company, we had about 50 different skews and products and we took that down over about a year period to just four products. And now we’re up to five. So we’re very focused on the products that we carry. Just, we want to be true experts and knowledge of those products. And then we really focus on the customer service side, the customer experience side. I mean, that’s one of our core values here at the company is creating amazing customer experiences. And our goal is to get the customer to say, wow, like I’ve never experienced anything like this before. So we almost backed into that. You were mentioning before about the marketing and the growth and everything because, because the product is such a high quality, we have really high margins that cost a lot of money to make products that are that quality.
Reggie (02:35):
So I didn’t really know any different when I started, I was just thinking, Oh, like everybody pays this much money for supplements. And so there’s not a lot of margins to really go out and spin, spin, spin, and like acquire all these new customers. So we really had to focus on keeping the customers that we had. And now I think everybody’s playing catch up a little bit as costs of Facebook, customer acquisitions, Google ads, and everything is really rising. People are starting to realize like, Oh, it’s so expensive. Now in that space is getting so crowded to acquire new customers. We’ve got to figure out how to keep the customers that we’ve acquired.
Charlie (03:11):
Yeah. I mean, and if your product is a higher price point, right. You have more margin to play with and you can basically just outbid the next, you know, the next company over there. Right. So that’s kind of the other, the, the, you know, the, yeah,
Reggie (03:25):
Fine. I meant high costs. I mean, our products, like our cost of goods is crazy high compared to other companies, not, sorry, not margin, but margin high cogs, a lot lower margin than, than a lot of people in the supplement space. So because the products are such high quality, they cost so much money to make that. We just don’t have a lot of room in there. So when you are the customer, we make them money getting them second, third, fourth, fifth order. Yeah.
Charlie (03:54):
Yeah. And I mean, so I buy supplements online. It’s one of those things I’ve, you know, jumped around and then I find something I like, and I just stay with it for years. And I’ve done that too. And once you like it, I’m literally, I have the link saved my phone and I’m like, I need more. And just like I know, and it’s like, they don’t sell on Amazon. They sell, it’s a very specific site. And I know this is like, where I go and this is what I buy. And it’s like, this is what I do. So I know, I know exactly what it’s like, right. Where once you do find something you like and ship well, and everything kind of works together nicely, you just do the same thing. Cause it is a consumable product. Right. So you constantly, you know, it’s not like buying a new mattress, we’re going to buy one and 10 years later by another, like in a buying every 30, 60, 90 days if it works for you. Right.
Reggie (04:42):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly right. And we’ve because of that, we’ve really started to focus our business on subscription and that’s worked really well for us over the last two years, we actually transitioned and migrated from Magento over to Shopify specifically for the reason of just being able to get up spun up on subscriptions faster and easier with recharge. And once we’ve done that, it’s just been, it’s been amazing for the company because you wake up and there’s a bunch of subscription orders, like in the beginning of the day, you know, it’s nice to have, and it makes it easier for the customer. They’re not running out of products. Makes it easier for us. It’s, it’s predictable. And it’s consistent revenue and you know, for them, it’s like, Oh, did I order this product? It just shows up when, when they’re almost out of their, you know, their bottle. So it’s nice. They don’t have to have the link on their phone. Like you got your mind like, Oh, I’m running low. Let me keep ordering. Like once they find something, they like, they can just set it up and forget about it.
Charlie (05:38):
Yeah. I liked that. So, but when you say focusing on the customer, how do you actually do that on a, on a subscription? Right? Because I know my, my protein powder site, I’ve never talked to them. I don’t call it. There’s not much there. I just kind of buy the link on my phone. How do you kind of have that customer experience?
Reggie (05:58):
That’s a great question. So we,
Reggie (06:01):
Our customer service team is in house. So we have some amazing customer. We call them ACEs, amazing customers.
Reggie (06:07):
You’re a specialist. That’s what
Reggie (06:09):
Their job is, is to just create that amazing customer experience. So when they sign up for a subscription, we are, we’re calling them, we’re going to pick up the phone and call them or text them just to make sure, you know, Hey, thank you so much for joining. I’m here for you. They’re automatically assigned to a preferred rep. So if they call in or deal with somebody, then that person, we automatically sign them in Zendesk as their preferred rep. So they get comfortable, they build a rapport that person knows we’re taking notes about the conversation or anything that they put in their notes, or if we’ve texted them back and forth. So we’re kind of keeping a customer profile about them
Reggie (06:49):
For future records or future conversations.
Reggie (06:52):
And then we’re going to call them right off the bat
Reggie (06:55):
And just talk to them and make sure that they’re set up on the proper subscription. They’ve got the right dosage set up. They
Reggie (07:01):
Really understand what the, you know, the product is doing and and how it can help. And then we’re encouraging them. Hey, reach out to us. If you’ve got any questions about the product, most people have never heard of beta glucan before our flagship product. They don’t know what that is. It actually helps like increase, make your immune system smarter boost your immune system. So there’s typically a lot of questions that come around with that. So we’ll, we’ll, we’ve created pretty long engagement sequences with lots of videos and information and research and science and interviews with people to educate them on the product. But then we’re also proactively reaching out for people that come in online and sign up.
Reggie (07:37):
We actually do about 40% of our business over the phone. So a lot of people are, they have a lot of questions and we’re, we’ve got the chat pop up.
Reggie (07:47):
Bob’s right. And they’re like, Oh, well, I actually did have a question for you. And they’re riding. And I’m like, Hey, is it okay? Can we jump on the phone? Can we talk? And we’ve just found that that creates a much better
Reggie (07:57):
Customer. Our AOV over the phone is like 330 bucks compared to
Reggie (08:05):
Online is like 160. So we know if we can get that customer
Reggie (08:07):
On the phone, it’s, it’s double the the,
Reggie (08:11):
And it creates a, a longer,
Reggie (08:13):
A higher customer, lifetime value as well. So
Reggie (08:17):
All those things, those, those high touch points and really explain the product
Reggie (08:21):
And those things create that, that customer experience for them. Wow. Okay. So you call every, every scription. So somebody goes, they buy checkout and they get a phone and the phone just rings
Reggie (08:34):
Not immediately, but within 24 hours. Okay. We’ll call them. If we don’t get in touch with them, we’ll send them a text, just let them know, Hey, we’re here. If you’ve got any questions, text us, call us, email us, whatever. But we just want to make sure again, that those
Reggie (08:46):
Subscriptions are set up, right,
Reggie (08:48):
The right interval, the right dosage, if they had, and then almost always people will have questions that they just ask on the website. They just kind of went ahead and bought it. So they’ll go ahead and ask. And then that’ll spark a great conversation that we can then do some more education about the product.
Charlie (09:02):
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Reggie (09:56):
We have
Charlie (09:58):
Here for people and they’re able to make all those phone calls. That’s
Reggie (10:03):
Calls a day, man. Outgoing. Yeah. And then of course all the inbound calls too.
Charlie (10:06):
Yeah. So this one, most of the time, basically you have really just hammer on the phone. Okay. Yeah. That is impressive. How did you guys even start that? Cause I feel like just having one person just kind of filled those phone calls. That must be a, that’s a high volume, right though.
Reggie (10:24):
Yeah, it is. We started when I actually started working in this business didn’t know anything different, right. It was an eCommerce business, but 80% of the orders were coming over the phone. So a lot of older people were just like calling because they had questions about the product they wanted to know about it.
Charlie (10:41):
Especially. I understand you guys don’t have a brick and mortar. You guys just people, they go over the phone because they went to a site, they saw like a number of somewhere on the site and they’re just dialing that’s. Right. All right. So they go to the web call the website. Yeah.
Reggie (10:55):
So we’ve made a lot of improvements to the website, put a lot of content on there and we’ve gotten that, you know, we’ve, we’ve really grown the company over the last five years. It’s like 10 X in revenue, but we’ve also brought it down to 40% instead of 80% volume on the, on the phones. But we’re still again, like, because that was in our DNA and we just really want to create a great customer experience with them. Just want to talk to the customers. Just want to make sure, like they know that we’re, we’re here for them that if it got questions and or if they need anything, if I need to change an order, if they, you know, we need to update their subscription for them. Cause they just want to call, you know, maybe they’re like, Oh, I just remembered I’m on my way home from work today. And I know I need some more beta glucan, but it’s just easier for them to call like while they’re driving home and just dial it up and we’re like, no problem. We’ll, we’ll swap out the subscription. We’ll have some there for you on Tuesday or something.
Charlie (11:47):
Yeah. That’s a different model. I feel like most people are trying hard to do literally. Exactly. Not that the opposite. Exactly the opposite. But the thing is once you get someone on the phone, like closing a sale is a lot like objection handling, right? Like it’s something that your website you have to try to do, but you’re trying to just get all of the objections ahead of time. Right. And someone might have some objection that’s completely in left field. Like I’m I don’t, I can’t even, I don’t even know the objection in your case, but some objection that you would never even think of. Right. And you can’t just like list out his, like his FAQ is 300 different, you know, 300 different objections, read them all. So like at some point, especially supplements, right? Like people are physically like ingesting something. So like you might have some questions and you’re not just going to want to read through pages of, is it okay if you’re pregnant? Is it okay if you are like, you know, just have this surgery just like thing, like yeah, yeah.
Reggie (12:42):
Or can I take all my coffee? Can I take it with a, a Whopper? Can I take it with a kale? You know? It’s like, yeah. All those things. Yep.
Charlie (12:49):
So, so basically you can like, objection handled just like on the fly at that point, instead of trying to like make the site objection, handle, you can just do it. And I like to AOV, right? Like, so average order value. It’s just going to be higher at that point. Cause then at that, right, you could say, Oh, do you like the glutamine? Was it? We also have the other, you know, glutamine. Yeah. And that’s great. And they go together and, and something like that, basically you’re upselling basically it’s upsell software except with the human at that point.
Reggie (13:21):
That’s right. Yeah. Hand to hand combat. So we’re cross selling we’re upselling and then we’re, you know, if they’re not, if they came in and just tried it, then those people it’s like, okay, we really are going to try to convert those people to a subscription after they’ve tried the product, they’ve tried it, you like it. It’s working. It’s great. Let’s save you some money by getting you over here on a subscription and make, you know, make everybody’s life easier. You won’t run out of it. So those are things that we’re, we’re doing a lot of hand to hand combat with our customer service team.
Charlie (13:48):
Do you guys do any sort of metrics on, so let’s just both. So AOV is one thing then lifetime value, right? So LTV, once they sign up for ascription the people who signed up just completely like on their own first, the people that signed up being like help handheld into it. Is there any difference on how many months you stick around you kind of found?
Reggie (14:10):
Yeah, absolutely. So before we started implementing some of these processes around, following up and calling, we were getting like three and a half orders on frequency on average of the subscription. Since then, we’ve been able to bump that up to seven and a half. So literally double, double the amount of orders that, and that’s still climbing as we’re, we’re getting our processes and everything better. And what we’ve found is this really interesting is so our customer lifetime value for some of that gets on a subscription now is like $1,200. It’s really high. And again, I think that just goes back to them having an amazing customer experience, but they’re ordering seven and a half times. So they’re, they’re typically coming in and trying it once, not on a subscription they love the product. Then they’re getting rolled into, we’ll try to roll them to a subscription and then they’ll take it for seven, eight months.
Reggie (14:58):
And then usually they’ll get too much product. They’ll build up an excess because they’ve forgotten to take it. And then they’ll call us and say, Hey, I don’t want to be on subscription anymore. Then they’ll come back and order some more because at, on a onetime cause, cause they still liked the product. They just had built up an excess cause they weren’t taking it regularly enough. So we’re working on solving that problem on the reminders and everything to get them to take it. But yeah, it’s, it’s we’re seeing really high. Like once we can give birth them to subscription where they’re getting in regular, the customer lifetime value is almost like three X as opposed to somebody that never gets signed up on that.
Charlie (15:34):
Yeah. And that really enables you guys at that point to just up your marketing budget now. Right. If you’re getting 1200 verse before what did he say? It was, let’s say 300. You can’t, if you’re only getting 300 LTV, you can’t spend more than 300 to acquire that customer, but now for 500, you’re still guessing pretty profitable. So you could spend drastically more and even with cogs drastically more and still weigh on top and be able to pay for all those support, you know customer service reps at that point. That’s right.
Reggie (16:07):
Yeah. They’re, they’re all, I mean they make us, you know, the money and the calculations for the, when you get a really good customer service rep that cares you start building those customers for life and then those customers actually start recruiting and bringing in their friends. I mean, we have, we have some of the customers that have brought in 20 and 30 people and it’s like, almost at that point you become like multilevel marketing. I mean, we wouldn’t, you know, never become the MLM, but you get those kinds of fanatics in the business when you create those amazing customer experiences for people where they’re like, Oh, well this has been so good for me. And they start like bringing their friends in and saying, Oh, you, you know, this is my rep. Like they almost become like family and they’re talking and asking questions and they’re like, you need to deal with this person.
Reggie (16:47):
Cause this is, this is our, our rep. And we one of the things that we do here is like, we have reviews all over the office, like up on the walls, we’ll put them up on the screens and they come into Slack every single day with a customer reviews. So we’ve gotten now several thousand on Trustpilot reviews, 4.9, which is, I think, I mean, that’s pretty much the highest you can possibly get a average 4.9 stars. And we’ll also treat it because a lot of the customers will write and say, I had the best experience with, you know, Charles or with Reggie or with somebody. So that’s almost like a badge of honorable, we’ll take some of those reviews and like print them out. Do some cool vinyl and like stick them on the wall, the customer service reps, office and stuff, because it’s, it’s nice. Right? It’s like a personal thing because they they created a great experience for that person.
Charlie (17:38):
Yeah. Every time I get a good review hair posted in the group and everyone kind of looks at it, thumbs up and you know, people, I don’t think people realize how much that counts in both sides. Right? Like if you’re the buyer and you do that, like people, it actually kind of matters. So you have so much, like there’s so many people that having a tough day and they’re kind of ragging on you and then you get this good review and it’s like, Oh wow. This is actually like really lifts you up. It’s surprising. Yeah.
Reggie (18:04):
What we’re doing is making a difference. And I say like, those reviews are like the gas that keeps the engine running because as those are, those are flowing in, you start to realize man, like every interaction I have with a customer, every order can, can be one of those reviews. Like it can make a big difference in that person’s life and their health.
Charlie (18:23):
When you were mentioning kind of working with support reps at care, how do you actually find that? Cause you hear a lot of people, right? Like outsource support, you know, these little you can hire teams to like answer your chat. And a lot of people use that it’s super popular, right? Where like they’ll 24 seven live chat, outsource it to someone who, you know, basically it’s just looking at the website to try to figure out the answer and if they can’t find it, you know, so be it. So how do you go from that extreme to extreme? You’re talking about of having like four dedicated people and actually get people who care.
Reggie (18:59):
We poach them. So I have one that I can think of. That’s a great example was one of our customer service reps would go to was at the grocery store and consistent like regularly, like the one right by her house. And regularly this lady would like provide her with just amazing experience. The grocery store always go extra. Hey, can I carry this out? Hey, did you know about this? Did you know, like we’ve got this, this coupon does it. And she kept telling us, she’s like this, this lady like at the grocery store is providing this incredible experience. I think she would be a great rep for here. So we hired her. And she’s awesome because it’s just in their nature. They’re, you know, those people are like, they want to serve, they want to give, they want to go above and beyond.
Reggie (19:47):
It’s really hard to teach that and train that. But when we see it out in the, out in the wild and I think that we’ve done that with like three people now. It’s like, if they’re doing it somewhere else and when you have that experience somewhere else, whether it’s in a movie theater or a restaurant or something where somebody’s all like that person is going above and beyond, you can tell, like they want to do things with excellence. They’re going to do that everywhere. Right. That’s that’s just, that’s who they are. And so we’re like, ah, I wanna come work with him,
Charlie (20:14):
Poaching, the grocery store.
Reggie (20:16):
Yeah, man, or wherever, wherever, wherever you’re getting great, you know, from a, from a restaurant or from anywhere that that you’re having somebody serve. If they provide you a great experience, then start talking to them about coming, you know, a better opportunity and working with you and providing, you know, and be like, we reward that. We love that. Our culture’s all about that. Do you want to come work somewhere where you’re like really appreciated and encouraged and challenged to do those things?
Charlie (20:43):
What do you say to those people though? They’re like, yeah, but my product is special. Like they need to have a
Reggie (20:48):
Lot of industry experience and they really need to like be into my, whatever niche. You know, we need to find people that are like into whatever they’re selling. How do you kind of respond to that?
Reggie (21:01):
You’re asking like people that would say, well, that doesn’t work. Cause you need like
Reggie (21:05):
Product experts. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think it’s way easier to train knowledge on a product. So we have,
Reggie (21:14):
I have some people here that are extremely knowledgeable about the product. So it’s very easy. If something gets like really
Reggie (21:20):
Technical to say, Hey, you know, we’ve got it,
Reggie (21:23):
We’ve got an expert here that I could transfer you to.
Reggie (21:26):
But 90% of the,
Reggie (21:28):
Those questions that people are going to ask, because they’re going to be, they’re going to be new. They’re going to be like, Oh, I want to know this, this and this. So we’ve got a hundred questions on our product once, you know, those hundred, you’re going to be able to answer almost every question for someone. And then we do a lot of continuing education, but we don’t we don’t put somebody on the phone talking with customers for almost three months. Usually when we bring them in and train them, it’s like a long process. Like, Hey, you need to learn this, this, this, this, this, and this. Once they learn that, learn the process
Reggie (21:59):
They can,
Reggie (21:59):
They can answer a lot of those questions and,
Reggie (22:02):
And people if they know that you care and you know that they’re trying to take care of them
Reggie (22:10):
Really going to be, I think I have a lot more grace and leniency, you know, for that, as opposed to somebody who just knows a bunch of stuff and doesn’t know how to effectively communicate that. So I think you can re you can teach the product knowledge in our case so much faster. It’s not like rocket science,
Reggie (22:31):
You know, where it’s a huge gap of knowledge, but I can teach that really quick, the product knowledge, but I can’t teach somebody how to
Reggie (22:43):
Care and serve and love the customer
Reggie (22:46):
That quick. Yeah, no, that’s a good point. What do you do around training though? So it takes three months kind of interested. Oh, it was three months now calling, are they like shadowing someone else? Or what are they doing to get ramped up? So they’ll start taking support, you know, they’ll, they’ll start.
Reggie (23:03):
So we have some courses that they’ll study. We have some books that they’ll go read. We have a lot of videos and trainings that we’ve recorded over the years that they’ll watch about the product. A lot of the websites, stuff that they’ll read, they’ll go through a lot of past in common support tickets and look at the way that we kind of answer them. Then they’ll shadow people. They’ll listen in on call.
Reggie (23:23):
And then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll
Reggie (23:25):
Just depending on how quick that person gets spun up, but we can bring them in as quick as three, four weeks to where they’re able to answer tickets, you know, email correspondence and tickets
Reggie (23:35):
Pretty quickly. So they can do those, but
Reggie (23:38):
Until they’re really ready and we do practice calls and all that stuff with them until they’re really ready to. Cause it’s one thing, knowing the knowledge and being able to look it up and kind of copy and paste it and having the time, you know, to go in there and answer the tickets versus like, man, if I’m on the phone with somebody, I’m placing their order over here on this screen. And then I’m over here, you know, trying to talk to them and answer their question and get their information. They’re telling me their name and their address while they’re also saying, but what is the bagel candidate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you really gotta have, like, it’s just a lot of practice before you can get efficient at doing all those things at once.
Charlie (24:11):
Yeah, no, I thought that’s yeah. It’s one of those things too. If you’re doing the initial over email, you basically get the same questions except with more time to answer them. So everything’s exactly the same chat live chat. Yeah. So yeah. So just to wrap up, we’ll just speed. Right? So start with email to go to live chat. It’s slightly more synchronous then got a phone and now you’re like, now you’re working at all times. So I’m out there. Yeah. Huh. Did you, so you said this was in the DNA of the company. How did you guys start this originally? Like what was this like, was there a brick and mortar or like what is the stock to actually be like this type of setup?
Reggie (24:53):
No. So there was never a brick and mortar it’s always been online, which is great. When I started working here at the very end 2010, I was actually just the it guy. I was here to help. And then I was updating the website and we’ll do all the tech stuff here for a couple of years. But the business was really, all the leads were coming in from an influencer, had written a book and was driving a ton of people into the business and saying, Hey, I’ve researched a ton of immune system products. This one’s, I used to recommend this one. I found a better one. Here’s the best one. And here is the place to buy it. And actually he would say go to their website or call him. And he put the number in the book. So that’s why we were getting so many phone calls. Cause people like they can’t click the link in the book, but they would just, yeah, it’s a paper book. So I just pick up the phone and call and that’s kinda how it all, you know, that’s, that’s where it started. And we’re just like, we’ve always been used to just a lot of people calling in and I want to talk and and do that. So we’ve just, we’ve just focused on it. Cause we’ve realized, Hey, it works.
Charlie (26:00):
Okay. Yeah. So you have that experience early on of some users calling in and they were like, Oh, you seem better, better customers. Let’s focus on these people.
Reggie (26:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Once you can have a conversation with somebody, they realize you’re a real person and that, you know, you’ve got knowledge of the product and you can explain, like you were talking about those objections, you can overcome those objections because even if they buy, they may still have those. And then they may take it once and be like, eh, but man, if you can overcome those objections with them right there in the beginning, they, they can become customers for life.
Charlie (26:32):
Yeah. So actually kind of different gifts. You’re talking about you guys re how recently do you go to subscriptions or one time?
Reggie (26:42):
Two and half years ago. Okay.
Charlie (26:44):
You started focusing on subscriptions. Yeah. Okay. And what was kind of that progression like and how do you actually do that? Because I feel like a lot of people, a lot of people want that. And some products, like obviously what you guys have actually like makes sense. Otherwise people are just kinda like gyming and you know, like this thing that you don’t really need every week, but they just want to give you something your product makes sense for that. But how did you kind of go from that one time? Cause that’s a tough transition.
Reggie (27:11):
It was. And I had a conversation with someone who runs a marketing company here in Atlanta called spring bot. His name is Brooks and we were at an event and I started talking to him about the business and where we wanted to go. And he had, you know, a very successful, big exit from a company before. So he was talking to me about valuation and multiples and EBITDA and all this stuff that I had no idea at the time what it was. And he was like, you know, you really need to focus your business on it
Charlie (27:41):
Subscriptions.
Reggie (27:44):
Okay. That makes sense. And he’s like because when it’s time for evaluation, you can get like a 10 X, multiple versus like a one X on your one-time sales. And that’s all I needed to hear. I was like, Oh, okay. So the company is 10 times more valuable if I’ve got subscription revenue and he’s like, yup. And I was like, okay. So from that conversation, not realizing it, you know, at the time, and then now fast forward, I was like, okay, how do we get subscription? So we try to do it on Magento. Couldn’t pull it off. It was just very cumbersome, difficult. Clunky. I had actually helped a friend of mine on Shopify with recharge juice subscriptions. And we built the whole thing herself in like two weeks, as opposed to when we were on Magento, hiring out an agency and doing all this stuff. And it just never really worked well. So I was like, we’re switching to Shopify just for this. So we switched over, got it built, started it. And then everything from in, even now we just point everything. We reward customers who have subscriptions with more loyalty points. We’re talking to them on the phone emails that go out are really focused on, you know, subscription. So just everything is pointing that direction. We give, we give pretty big discounts for people that jump on subscriptions. So everything in every incentive is pointed in that direction. It’s been slow.
Reggie (29:10):
Yeah. Anywhere from like 15 to 20%.
Charlie (29:15):
Interesting. Yeah. The nice part with that too is, you know, every month, you know, I have to order X number of products. Like you’re not, it’s not such wild swings basically. Like you’re not going to have one really bad month where you’re like, Oh, what is just kind of like crash like yours and have that base, you know, that basis there. And obviously people turn out, you said what seven months. But like, you know that, and on average that average and you just know, all right, we’re going to have X, we’re going to have on average, most likely about X starting next month, we at least order that you can look, then you can look, I’m guessing that the onetime sales is now getting to be a smaller percentage each month of the total.
Reggie (29:53):
Yeah. It’s been a hundred to 80 to 70 and now it’s about 56.
Charlie (30:00):
Okay. And it was like a small, so, you know, you have 50 that you guarantee and you have the other 50, that’s like your wiggle room. And if they don’t and something goes wrong, the other 50, right. You can always just use it for the subscriptions next month because they’re not that perishable.
Reggie (30:15):
Yeah, that’s right. We have a five year shelf life on the product, so stock up and it’s just really helped also with forecasting inventory, which I know, you know?
Charlie (30:24):
Yeah. No, I’m not, I’m happy to hear more about it. So kind of you guys started kind of, that helps. Let’s kind of go into that.
Reggie (30:32):
Oh, I mean, just, just knowing, you know, the, the growth rate of the subscriptions and knowing what’s, what’s coming and how many people are dropping off and you know, how much product you’re going to need and want. And guaranteed. It’s just really nice to know over the next three months, we’re going to need, you know, X, because this plus growth it’s, it’s stable. And we always make sure we, you know, there’s been a couple of times where we’ve run out of product because of production, but we’ve always had a reserve amount for our subscribers. So that’s one of the benefits where you advertise, like you’d never run it, you know, as if we can get product anywhere, you get first priority on it. So our subscribers have never run out, even though we’ve been out of product before we couldn’t sell any more to the onetime, people will cut it off and drop it off the website and say out of stock, but we’ll continue to ship the subscriptions with the remaining inventory.
Charlie (31:20):
That is very cool. Do you guys run your own warehouse to do this or is it all kind of three? PL we did
Reggie (31:26):
Did actually up until January of this year and we outsourced to a fulfillment center in Denver called quick box. That does nothing but supplements. So that was really important for us for a lot of the FDA rules and regulations around shipments and how things were handled and how we, we knew all the painful processes that we had to go through doing it ourselves. And one of the reasons we didn’t want to outsource it because a lot of three feels like they just, they don’t care about those things. They treat it like any other product. But we found a company that literally just does supplements. So they were very familiar. Did the process even better than we did. And so we felt like, okay, now it’s time to, to let go of this.
Charlie (32:07):
Yeah. That’s one interesting thing about a three pill that I think most people don’t realize at first for whatever type of product you’re selling, there’s some free pill out there that does that thing. And they like, that’s all they do. And like, so if you sell them like, Oh, that’d be like frozen and like 63 degrees and like delivered by plane. They’re like, yeah, that’s all we do. And there’s like one, three pellet guns. And it does like TVs, you know, like that’s all you do this. We specialize in T like, you know, large, like the shape of the object. And like, they just, they can, the shelving is different and they’re like, that is weird, but okay. And you start to, if you sell, if you sell that type of product, it’s great. Yeah. And that’s kind of the neat part. Cause like you look at the list of three pills and you talk to this complete aside, but you’re like, how do I pick this? As many of them just like, even just we’re talking like the lower 48, there’s quite a few of them, but if you actually start digging in, they all do this general ones, but most of them do something different and you just gotta figure out what that something is. Is it your something?
Reggie (33:12):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Charlie (33:14):
Any kind of last tips you could share or anything if someone’s gonna sit at home and they listening and they want to get a little kind of curious and they want to get a little more customer service, what would you kind of recommend?
Reggie (33:29):
There’s a great book called customer service revolution. And I’ve read this book. I’m going to tell you that the author of it just a second here, but I have read it several times. Our whole team’s gone through it, but it’s by the Julius, John to Julius. And I would say if you’re really looking to up the customer service game and your business, that’s a great place to start. His, his group has helped Starbucks and a lot of these, these brands that are known for customer service. So I would start there. We’ve also taken our team and done training at the Ritz Carlton, knowing that like they provide the best customer service. They’re actually like the people that train Chick-fil-A. And so there’s a lot of brands out there that do customer service really well and they train on those things. So taking some of those nuggets and plugging them in.
Reggie (34:27):
And then one of the great tips that we’ve got actually from the Ritz Carlton was for systems and processes. If you’re looking to implement those is looking at some of these like companies that do these huge awards for like the best customer service companies out there, the ones that actually give the award to say, Hey, Ritz, Carlton won this award, looking at their criteria of what qualifies and just reverse engineering. Those into processes in your business is a, is a, is a nice little tip, right? That you can just take and use and be like, Oh, well what qualifies these things? How do they judge? Oh, we’re just going to build a process to make sure we do that. Great.
Charlie (35:07):
I like that. Yeah. It’s one of those things, whatever you’re trying to do, it’s nice. It’s usually helpful. You find someone who’s already done it and it’s usually completely adjacent has nothing to do with what you’re doing. Just like obviously the Ritz Carlton is not your competitor, but you just find them and just say, you know what? Let’s just copy half of Ash because they’ve already done it. They have the model it’s working like Starbucks. It’s working, obviously they’re doing well. Let’s just take a bunch of those. We’re going to borrow a few of those ideas and just do them. So you’re not just like starting on a blank piece of paper you’re taking, what’s already working
Reggie (35:38):
And just bringing it into your business. I love that concept. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That’s super helpful. Anything kind of want to plug any of links. We can leave here real quick. Would love for all your listeners. Check out better way health.com. That’s our company, our product, we sell the highest quality beta glucan on the market helps make your immune system smarter, better, faster, stronger. So anybody with an immune system, which is everybody needs the product. Okay. That’s my plug. Let’s do it. I will leave a link in the show notes. Thank you very much for coming out today. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it, Charles. [inaudible].
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