How FruitStand delivers tasty fruit and customer smiles with Re:amaze

Caviar limes are a cult classic with FruitStand customers. Some purchase them every month, hooked on these pickle-shaped pinky finger-sized fruits. Slice them in half then squeeze out the inside of the fruit, literally crunchy sparkling citrus pearls, onto guacamole, fish or in a margarita. They make any meal unique!

FruitStand is an online marketplace that partners with small farms across the United States to bring high quality, often times super weird, limited seasonal produce to the doorsteps of customers. The marketplace provides small farmers with an additional income stream, as 50% of the profit goes back into their pockets. Customers love having a way to get hard to find produce in their hands without having to step foot in a store, all the while, supporting a small farm.

In my role as the Customer Experience Manager for FruitStand, it is my job to understand the impact of the experiences. How every piece of fruit tells a story, from the land it is grown on to the farmer who harvests it. And, how every piece of fruit then becomes an experience, from a customer who last ate lychee 10 years ago while traveling to a customer who lives in a food desert and now has a way to receive their favorite fresh avocados on demand.

The experience doesn’t stop there.

When a customer has an issue, such as an unforeseen shipping delay, typo on a mailing address or a damaged box upon delivery, it should be simple to resolve.

FruitStand connects with customers on a variety of channels:

• Email
• SMS
• Chat Support
• Facebook Messenger
• Facebook Wall Post Comments
• Facebook Advertisement Comments
• Instagram Comments
• Instagram Direct Messages
• Stamped.io Reviews

Phew! That’s a lot! And, the FruitStand support team is made up of 2 people (1 of them is myself!).

It is important for us to consistently stay connected to our customers, respond to support issues, address concerns and review feedback across the channels above. We also need a way to collect CSAT and review metrics across the board. Therefore, to keep everything in one place, we use a platform called Re:amaze.

This platform makes it easy for us to have one login to one place to answer comments from all of those other places listed above, all the while, collecting feedback and analyzing metrics to do our best to stay on top of supporting our customers.

Here are some of our favorite Re:amaze features and how we use them:

Keeping informed with an internal & external knowledge base

Our customer support considers ourselves “hearts with ears”, listening to customers to ensure they are heard and their concerns addressed. But, in order to be able to provide friendly, consistent support with actual resolutions, we need to know what we’re doing and how to do it. The ease of creating a customer facing knowledge base with Re:amaze alongside an internal team knowledge base is one of my favorite features. It’s simple to use and publish articles with images in a simple knowledge base that is accessible via our Live Chat as well. There’s a lot of fruit to cover, both for customers and for the team, and we want to have an updated resource for our customers and our team to find our answers should we need it. Check out our external knowledge base here.

Closing the loop with the On Hold feature

Not all issues can be resolved in the moment. While we wish that we could take care of everything right then and there, when we’re shipping a product, we’re at the mercy of the shipper as they work hard to bring our product to the customer’s door. This means that we often need to follow up with a customer, whether it be via email, SMS, Facebook comment or another of the communication channels we provide. Keeping tickets open in a queue can be overwhelming and confusing. Instead, we write the customer back, inform them we’ll follow up on X date, add an internal comment for ourselves or a teammate to know what’s going on and put the ticket “On Hold”. Then, we actually follow up on X date. It’s simple to close the loop with our customer! This feature allows us to set a specific date and time in the future to remind us to follow up. There is a separate folder where admins on the team can view all “On Hold” tickets, which is helpful just in case one of us is out. While this seems like a simple feature, it’s one that gives us the ability to stay connected with our customers to show we actually care and resolve issues in a timely manner.

Staying on top of trends with Tags

Tags might be one of my love languages. Throughout my career at different companies, I’ve created robust yet simple tagging schemes to keep track of trends, issues and use the stories they tell as a tool to impact change that enhances the customer experience as a whole. At FruitStand, we tag every inquiry that comes through on every channel. We are measuring for volume on specific produce types, the types of issues that come through as well as any action steps that we take to resolve that issue. For example, we experienced a higher volume of shipping questions one week. When we looked into this further, we noticed that the tracking link emails were not going out to customers so they had no clue where their orders were, hence them reaching out. We used this insight from tags to help us identify what product this happened on and could reach out to the right folks at our company to get it fixed.

Knowing more about our customers with Integrations

Our orders are processed using an e-commerce tool called Shopify. Re:amaze does a great job integrating with this platform to provide us with information about our customer’s order history. If a customer emails us, we can open that message to view recent and past orders along with having access to changing an address or providing refunds right through the ticket.

We use Stamped.io for our customer product reviews. Re:amaze integrates with Stamped.io to showcase the history of reviews a customer has left about a product, all from within a ticket. When we interact with the customer, we can reference comments that they shared to gather more information and resolve any outstanding issues.

We also love SMSBump, a marketing tool for SMS campaigns. When we send a text to a customer about an upcoming product, they can reply to that text and it will arrive to our support team. Every text reply gets a response, even if someone just pops in to say “thanks”.

While we’re stoked about our 4.6 CSAT average for the entire year of 2020, we’re always learning and growing alongside our customers to improve the experience as a whole. Thanks, Re:amaze, for being part of our adventure!

Side note: No, I was not paid to write this piece by Re:amaze. I’m writing it on my own, unsolicited because it’s a tool that we use and when I started using it over a year ago, there wasn’t much written about it. I wanted to create a resource to support others that may be considering this platform. Feel free to connect with me using one of the links in my bio below this article or send me a message over in CX Accelerator if you have questions!

Second side note: If you ever want to try something at FruitStand, please do reach out and I will make some magic happen.