From Unconventional Experiences to the King of Customer Experience, with Eli Weiss, Director of Customer Experience at OLIPOP
How brands should be thinking about leveling up their customer experiences
To say that Eli Weiss has taken an untraditional path to where he is today would be an understatement. Currently, Weiss is the Director of Customer Experience at OLIPOP, but his roots are in a traditional orthodox Jewish household, his education does not include a college degree, and his first job in the industry came as a result of him doing a powerpoint presentation to the folks at an emerging luggage brand about why they were failing. Yeah, not what you’d expect. But Weiss’s whole career is about going above and beyond expectations — consumer expectations. From that luggage brand to NUGGS Vegan Chicken Nuggets, and now with OLIPOP, Weiss has become a master of building out the ultimate customer experience. And he’s done it by going back to the basics.
“On day one, let’s look at expectations across the entire customer journey and see, are we delivering on what we’re promising?” Weiss said. “So what that looks like on a very practical and tactical level is looking at ad copy, is the ad copy you’re pitching, is that actually what you’re delivering when customers click place order? And then thinking through, what’s the next stage? When they click on that ad copy, get onto your site, is your website experience seamless and easy? Are people getting the information they need or do they have to reach out and ask questions by email? And then the next thing is shipping and delivery. What we’ve seen is brands will charge $150 for a t-shirt and then ship it with USPS and it can take three weeks. Piecing those two together, if this is a luxury product, you should get luxury treatment on shipping and delivery. Then obviously product, like there’s just a lot of trauma around people ordering something that gets shipped from across the world, so making sure that they get at what they expected it to look like. And then obviously customer service and return. So making sure that if we promise that we have great 24 hour response time and it takes three days to respond, we’re already missing it.”
Weiss says that brands that create experiences people remember, and that treat people like humans will always do better than the brands that only try to sell, sell, sell. He also mentions that there are certain parts of the customer experience that are being overlooked that could be areas to make an impact. And one is right after the customer clicks “buy.”
“When you think about post purchase, that is when a consumer, right after they place a purchase, probably has a little bit of regret of like, ‘Oh, should I have spent this kind of money on a soda?’ or, ‘Should I have spent this kind of money on a bag?’ or whatever it is,” Weiss said. “And that’s the moment of regret. And I think that most brands in the zero to 30 days after purchase focus on, how can I upsell, cross sell, resell and every other selling mechanism in the books? Less focus on, how do I make you feel a good way about the purchase you made, whether it’s sharing brand story, sharing the story of the founders, sharing what success using this product looks like. And then I think the second purchase and the third purchase comes naturally when you have those expectations met, instead of focusing on how do I squeeze more money out of the customer, which is a lot of what growth marketing has been transitioning to.”
Another area of focus for brands that want to deliver good CX is in the people you hire. Weiss said that you should be looking for a very specific kind of person for a customer service position, and it’s not who you might think.
“I think that the biggest misconception around customer experience is it’s for people that love talking to people, and ironically, it’s not at all that because people that are talking to are generally super angry and it takes a lot of empathy, a lot of EQ, a whole bunch of reading between the lines and creative thinking to be able to resolve and tactfully walk through these issues and help customers out. So I think when I’m hiring, I’m looking for people that are so obsessed with making things right and turning a frown into a smile.”
To hear more wisdom from Weiss, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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