Can you tell me a little bit about your role? What does your job title really mean?

I’m a VP of Product at Dollar Shave Club. I’m responsible for feature development across both our web and mobile properties. Specifically, my team and I focus on our member experience, and the mobile app plays a key part in that because we use it to create a more meaningful relationship with our customers. Overall, my team is responsible for driving our members to download the app and then developing a deeper relationship with them once they have the app.

So how does the product team fit into the overall eCommerce team? Do you guys talk to each other a lot?

Absolutely. We work really closely with our colleagues, both in engineering as well as marketing to bring a lot of these initiatives to life. We are very highly integrated and have really close relationships working on small teams that are focused to particular areas of the business.

 

What is your top priority at the moment?

One of the biggest challenges in the mobile space right now is app fatigue and people not wanting to have another app on their phone. With a business like DSC where you can do a lot on the mobile website already, customers tend to feel that you need to earn a space on their phone and it’s no longer enough to just copy the mobile website. This is where I think personalization can really set your experience apart. If you take a look at the DSC app, you’ll see that we’re taking time to onboard our customers, getting to know them at a deeper level. We ask for their content preferences, as well as their grooming and skincare habits.

 

Personalization has been around for a long time, so what is DSC doing differently? Are you just focusing on onboarding or are there other areas that you are personalizing as well?

We’ve been talking about personalization for a while, but very few brands are actually doing it in deep, meaningful way (from a product promotion standpoint). In emails and other communications, very rarely do companies take time to find out what kinds of things you’re really interested in and then follow up to see if the product you purchased met that need.

For example, how many times have you received an email with a ‘featured product’ that just isn’t a good fit for you?

At DSC, we’re actually trying to close the loop on personalization. We’re recommending products based on real things that you’ve told us about yourself, and then actually taking the time to ask if you like or dislike that product post-purchase. It’s different from a review, which is self-serving in order to sell more products to other people. It’s more of a reminder that we’re listening, and if you tell us what you like, we’ll provide you with the right product every time. Essentially we’re going to a deeper level with our customers and closing the loop to see if our recommendations truly fit the bill or not.

 

How difficult has it been to get those preferences correct in the first place? It’s easy to get there post-purchase, but how are you doing it pre-purchase?

As I mentioned, my team focuses primarily on member experience. The preferences that we’re collecting are from folks who’ve actually already become members of the Club, so it’s not necessarily a pre-purchase experience. It hasn’t been difficult at all to collect that information from our members. Customers will share information if they trust you’ll use it to actually improve their experience. Now they know we’re recommending products based on specific concerns they have with their grooming routine (rather than sending them a marketing gimmick or trying to upsell their subscription), so they are much more open to our messaging now. To me, it’s all about making everything 100% about the customer- it’s about making their experience better for themselves. Make it feel like you’re doing something for them, and you won’t have to struggle anymore.

 

What are the first steps in making everything 100% about the customer?

Just start talking to them. It could be as easy as taking a customer list and calling some folks on it, or bringing them into the office to get their feedback on what feels personalized and what doesn’t. The very first thing to do is collect that user-feedback and find where the friction points are and then, depending on what type of product or service you’re offering, start to make small incremental customizations.

 

Can you share any obstacles you had along the way or any times where you thought ‘wow, we didn’t think of that’?

So far (knock on wood), we haven’t had too many obstacles because we started with very obvious ways to personalize. The more customized you get, the trickier the engineering effort can be, both from an initial execution standpoint as well as an ongoing support and optimization standpoint. We started slow and considered the gains we could make from small tweaks to the experience, rather than trying to do too much too fast. Look for the quick wins and the big wins so you don’t create a mess in your platform trying to maintain it overtime. We didn’t do that luckily, but I could definitely see that being a pitfall that people could run into.

 

As a side question, have there been any specific considerations for desktop versus mobile? Do your personalization efforts run pretty consistently across the two, or do you put more effort into one versus the other?

No, not necessarily. You tend to have folks that check in more often or have higher sessions per time period on mobile vs. desktop. Generally speaking, we’ve seen a higher level of engagement in the mobile app (like most companies) so we’ve put a little more time into building a richer experience there, then transferring these features to desktop too.

 

Are you going to maintain this level of commitment to personalization over the coming months or try to ramp it up even further?

We’ll continue to make a large investment of time and resource into this, and find even more ways to customize the user experience. Getting people to buy the right products is the first step, but there’s so much more we can do with regards to tailoring the Club experience. I can’t share specifics, but we have a lot of exciting new ideas for 2018.

 

I don’t want you share too much around vendors, but was most of this done in-house or did you outsource it? And if so, how did you decide which vendor to go with?

All of our app development is done in-house. For app specific AB testing and such we’ve used Techletics(?). We’ve also used Branch to drive increased personalization through deep-linking etc. But otherwise we’re an in-house shop on the mobile side of things.

I’ve worked with these two vendors for a long time. They have helped to make our mobile experience super tight, with a consistent cross-platform experience too. I initially picked them because they are real leaders in their space, and have a high level of engagement between their client support managers and customers.

 

Any final personalization tips or advice?

Talking to your customers is the biggest priority. Also, look at some of the sites you interact with on a day-to-day basis and look a them through your own ‘customer lens’- consider what they are doing well and not doing well to serve your own needs, and feel free to borrow their best ideas. Paying more attention to personalization in your own life provides a great starting point for new ideas and projects to implement at your company.

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