Case Study
Soak.com Increases Post-Sale Customer Satisfaction
Founded
2007
Industry
Bathroom Retail
Headquarters
Nuneaton, UK
Employees
> 200
About soak.com
UK-based retailer soak.com specializes in bathroom fixtures, furnishings, and accessories. They have a lot of high-value items as well as many large and fragile items (think sinks and glass shower doors) that require some delivery coordination. This means that in addition to the usual KPIs that matter to any ecommerce retailer, the post-sale follow up process is especially valuable for soak.com. Features like text alerts and shipping notifications help customers beyond the purchase process and ensure long term satisfaction. Customers who don’t participate in these post-purchase features tend to require more customer service assistance or express more dissatisfaction with the delivery process.
In this test, soak.com wanted to optimize this post-purchase experience both for its customers and for its customer service organization.
The Test
As part of the checkout process, soak.com includes an optional field for customers to enter their phone number. Having a phone number allows the delivery companies to inform the customer of expected delivery times and reduces calls to the customer service call center. This both improves customer satisfaction and helps soak.com reduce operations costs.
Because of the overall benefits of having a customer phone number, the web analytics and ecommerce teams tested making the field mandatory. The team’s main concern was improving the post-purchase experience without negatively affecting conversions.
Results
The test ran for 16 days and saw over 28,000 users. Across all devices, soak.com measured site conversion, revenue per visit, time per visit, and checkout field error rates. While error messages (stating that the phone number field is required) increased, this did not affect conversions or revenue on any device. Most importantly, after implementing the mandatory phone number field, post-sales customer calls decreased by 15%. This suggests a happier customer experience and optimizes cost allocation for post-purchase customer service.
