From Shipping to CX
In this session, Yaw Aning, co-founder of Malomo, discusses transforming the e-commerce customer experience through AI and personalized shipping, highlighting how Malomo turns the post-purchase journey into a unique brand storytelling and engagement opportunity. Yaw also explores the broader impact of AI in e-commerce, emphasizing the creation of deeper, more meaningful brand-customer relationships.
(upbeat music)
- And welcome to our next session
with Yau and Ing with Malomo.
Yau, how are you doing today, man?
- Hey, I'm Greg, Brian.
Thanks for having me.
How are you?
- I'm good.
I am super happy to have you here to have this discussion.
I know you got thoughts and opinions, so let's just go
right into it.
First of all, for those that don't know Malomo,
which I don't know how, like, that's insane.
- I'm a little bit of a "Malomo"
just because of the name at the very least.
And I know the name comes from a very special experience
that you have.
So can you tell us a little bit about your company?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
For sure.
Yeah, Malomo, we are an order tracking platform
that we focused on, you know,
high growth merchants on the Shopify ecosystem.
Our goal is to really bring transparency
to the delivery experience,
help our merchants kind of control the customer experience
after someone buys,
and really be proactive with them about letting them know
where their package is in the delivery process.
And then, like, our big sort of, like,
I would say, maybe differentiator or our thesis
that I think is different from most of the market is that
shipment tracking has historically sort of been
this very stale, engineering experience.
We wanted to help merchants make it very enjoyable,
help them stand out from the crowd
and use tracking as a way to connect in unique ways
with their consumers,
and ultimately make it a more profitable experience
for the merchant and more delightful for the consumer.
So we helped build a lot of tools
in order to make that a reality.
- There's been, there's several sessions today
where the topics of customer education
and product education,
celebrating your customers comes up
and I think that this blends itself so well.
- So we'll get into that,
but actually just out of curiosity,
I know you've been in the DDC space for a while now
and you're at an agency prior to Milomo.
When you bet on Shopify,
was it seriously just a bet and it actually kind of paid off
or while Shopify was one of the e-commerce platforms
that it kind of took off?
Or did you have this sneaky suspicion?
You knew some data points and you knew
Shopify would be in this position at the right.
- Yeah, it's such a good question to think back
to that time when you were first,
with our agency,
we would work with direct to consumer brands.
And a lot of times they would come to us asking for like,
"Hey, I'm launching a brand new storefront
or I've got sort of like a brick and mortar business
and I'm trying to bring it online."
And we ended up in the very early days,
sort of canvassing the market around solutions.
And we would, our agency would build
kind of custom technology that would plug into Shopify
and help them do some different things.
And so we would canvass the market
and look at a lot of different solutions.
And one of the things that stuck out about Shopify
was from a developer perspective, I'm not a developer,
but I didn't see obviously we did talk about development.
They're APIs and how extensible they were,
how they let developers build like,
what felt like any type of experience
that you wanted to enable.
It just was unparalleled.
And so we did not know,
like we felt like Shopify was small.
Like it definitely didn't feel like this large ecosystem,
but the rate at which they were moving their technology
forward felt very like new and unique.
And that's what we made a bet on,
was like a modern technology stack would ultimately win
in most of our merchants.
They not only loved,
well, I mean, they loved the aspect of,
it's really easy for them to manage the storefront
and their product inventory and all that stuff.
And then for us as developers,
we can do all these crazy things.
And so it felt like such like a symbiotic relationship
that we felt like we couldn't ignore.
So I wouldn't say like we knew that Shopify
was gonna be as successful as it's become.
It was more of like, we just love this ecosystem
and what they've built and like,
we wanna continue to build on it
'cause it just felt so like they were ahead of the game.
- Yeah.
Well, good bet.
And I guess two, it's like,
they're very, and I've heard it from the outside.
They're very customer focused.
And in your example,
it's clear that like customer focus
to them also means giving you the tools as a developer
to utilize their platform as best as you can.
And that's like what they did.
That's awesome to hear.
Okay, so let me take it to like this next topic,
which is, and I brought it up briefly,
I was, there's a session today with Shrei
from Good Peeps, a D2C brand.
And he started bringing up the reasons behind
why it's so important to educate your customers,
to inspire your customers
and to inform your customers
and pretty much celebrate at the end of the day.
I think that both really well with shipping honestly.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And how do you see that?
And if you can like share a couple examples,
use cases or just in your opinion,
where you can do all this through the shipping experience.
- Yeah, so actually the genesis of Milomo
in the early days actually came from this exact problem
or opportunity, depending on how you look at it.
Yeah, so I was,
I was just enamored by these direct to consumer brands.
It all felt like they were like launching
these really incredible, highly crafted products.
And so any opportunity that I found to buy
from a direct to consumer brand I take.
So I was in the market for a backpack.
As a busy entrepreneur, you often have to travel
and take like these two or three day trips.
And I just hated, I hated traveling with a big suitcase
'cause it just felt like overkill.
So I was looking for sort of like this backpack
where I could, I could do these trips.
And so I found this brand,
people probably know it by now.
This is probably back in 2016 or 2017 called Nomadic.
And I think I found their Kickstarter
and it was just like, oh, this is really cool.
Like I like the feel of the bag, et cetera.
So I place an order and then I just weirdly got into
like this like mental state of like how to like efficiently
pack for trips.
I don't know why.
And so like I just go like YouTube like different ways
like pack for trips or like different like places
that you could go and like that.
That like just really got me excited about getting the bag
'cause there was, you just envision like all the things
that you're gonna do once you get that product.
And I was like no offense to Nomadic
but back in the back in the day like,
I don't think any brand is doing this.
Like once I got the package,
I was like expecting for them to educate me
on all these things that I like innately felt
like I wanted to do.
It's also like what we should be,
we should sort of like get our like the brands
that we work with to do this.
Like shipping, it's sort of this boring thing
that people do.
But once you buy something, you have this moment
where you have like literally a captive audience
of that single consumer, they're highly engaged
with paying attention to your brand.
Like merchants should leverage that to engage them
and keep them entertained or educated
about the product, the brand, new products that are coming out.
And so that was the use case for no one.
It's like, oh, we could turn shipping
into this like really interesting marketing
or attention channel.
So I like I sort of pitched that to my co-founder Anthony.
Like the original for his point of view
like when you were thinking about this,
it was more of just like,
let's just create this dashboard
where we can tell merchants where their orders were.
I was like, but once we do that,
there's this other kind of like really cool thing
that we can do which is like,
makes us a really unique marketing channel.
So we use the two together
that sort of like making it all know.
- That's fascinating.
And again, I'm creating an assumption,
but it's more about timing, right?
Because at that point, there's brands,
they've always have the ability to email their customers
after someone purchases.
But there's this time of like,
hey, they get really excited about where is my item at, right?
And again, like it goes back to the customer support.
Number one question, everyone gets is where is my order?
But is that what it is?
Like at the at the helm of it, it's just the timing.
It's that excitement, it's like an inflection point.
And it's like, well, if we got them up here,
like it's the best time to educate,
is that really where it comes down to?
- Yeah, I mean, there's like rarely a place
that you can make a more strong impression than shipping.
Like you said, the timing is so crucial
because the emotional state of the consumer
is in such a unique place.
They're both like excited, but anxious, right?
They're anxious that their product's not going to arrive.
So they go to their order to track it
and they track it a bunch, like a lot.
We sort of seen that, you know, upwards of a fifth
of all website traffic hits one page
and that's your status page.
So like it's just customers really care.
And so their emotional state is pretty heightened
from that anxiousness, but they're also super excited,
right? They're super excited to get this thing
that they probably searched forever for on the internet,
right? They looked at alternatives,
they read the product reviews,
they decided to buy from your brand.
So they want to also hear from you,
like about who your brand is,
what you stand for, what your products can do in their life
that makes their life better.
So that timing is really, I mean, it's like,
that the timing creates this emotional pressure
and that emotional pressure can like help you form
a brand impression either positively or negatively.
- Is it also like confirmation as well too?
Because at least in my opinion,
sometimes there's this guilt almost after a purchase
of like, "Oh, did I make the right purchase right now?"
And do some of your brands or your customers
kind of take that opportunity too to almost confirm
that it's like, "Hey, let's know you made the right purchase.
"Let me tell you about the brand.
"I'm gonna tell you about the story again and again
"to make you feel, do you, other merchants
"that utilize that moment and stuff like that?"
- Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think you nailed it too.
Like, for some consumers, they might discover your brand
through a random ad.
Like, I've got a hat from Melon on my desk.
Like literally just saw this Facebook ad.
That is such a dope hat.
- And your purchase right there.
- And your purchase, yeah.
- Oh, they are the,
the look and like audience for all these brands, that's you.
- They want you.
- Oh, I'm targeted.
- I'm targeted, right?
It works.
But like, in that moment, like,
"Oh, is that a bad idea?"
Like, and it's not even like,
I was at it like, will I not love the product?
Some of it's like, is this a real brand?
Like, did I just buy from some sort of like
vaporware company and get my money stolen?
'Cause that happens, right?
- How's that gonna happen to you?
(laughing)
- So there's definitely some of that
of just reinforcing.
Like, this is a great idea.
I'm gonna show you all the reviews from others
who've made a similar decision as you.
I'm gonna tell you how they use the product,
how they get the value of the product.
And so you just peek in all of that emotional connection.
- Yeah. - Awesome.
So let me just ask you another question about post-per...
Or not even post-perches,
let's just say customer experience in general.
Is there anything like that I'm missing,
if I were to say, yeah,
I think customer experiences around celebrating
your customers, customer education,
you know, bleeding the brand into the experiences well too?
Is there anything else that like you'd say is
also as important as those three?
And again, this is off the cuff.
So I'm just curious if you can say something else
when it comes to customer experience about these brands.
- Yeah, I mean, like the basics of like,
you know, I think a lot of brands also don't want to do this,
but getting out ahead of problems too,
you know, they're in the delivery experience.
Like, I think about, you know, carriers get a lot of flack.
They get a lot of anger thrown at them for, you know,
losing packages, getting them, not delivering them on time,
them being damaged.
And you think about like literally billions of packages
are moving across the world in just a few days.
The coordination that is required to do that
on the scale that these carriers do it,
it's sort of like the eighth one of the world in my mind,
that anything even arrives, like I could,
Brian, I could literally go outside my door,
put something in the mailbox,
and then like three days it would arrive
on your doorstep in Chicago from Indianapolis.
Like that is sort of like amazing to me.
But like that scale means that like things
are going to go wrong.
Like there's like, there's two things that are sure in life,
like, or three things, death taxes and like a package will go.
(laughs)
- What was that?
- That's like the first time you said that, huh?
That's the one I wrote first.
(laughs)
I just put those in my backpack and just wait, wait.
- I love it.
- But like just trying to predict, right?
When an experience is going to go bad,
and then telling the customer what's happening,
tell them what you're gonna do about it, right?
Setting a new expectation.
If that expectation changes,
start getting ahead of those things.
There's been a lot of research that says like,
if somebody like has an experience with your brand
and it's bad, and you work really hard
to rectify that experience proactively,
the loyalty from that consumer to your brand
is actually higher than if something wrong
never occurred with that consumer in the first place.
And so being able to like just get ahead of those problems,
knowing that they're gonna happen
is also kind of a key part of that.
That overall customer experience and brand loyalty.
- Yeah, I think I could see some similarities
between again, the post-purchase experience with shipping.
Like you mentioned, just to clarify,
hey, a package is getting lost.
It's better to text them, email them upfront
as soon as you have that understanding and notification.
And then it goes to just customer support,
I assume in general, I honestly agree with what you just said.
Like pro being proactive is probably that fourth
kind of topic pillar that I forgot to mention
because I do think now more than ever, life is busy
and a brand is important, it's important to be proactive
with that ever message or whatever they want to talk to.
Right? - Yep.
- Super interesting. - Yep.
- Let me kind of pivot this to,
if you have any thoughts, I know you have thoughts
and opinions, but does, and specifically about AI.
So let me kind of set the stage really quick.
There's a ton of technology companies today
that are, the next announcement is around new AI functionality
with their platform and their platform.
And I wanna say like, take yourself outside of Malomo
and put yourself in the merchant's shoes for right now.
Like if you're a merchant, would you like try to utilize
as much of this AI technology use cases as possible?
Would you kind of put yourself on hold?
Where would you start if you were a merchant?
- Yeah, that's a wonderful question.
Like it is, even as a founder,
like I'm thinking about the same things in my business, right?
Like, AI is gonna change my business for the better,
maybe even for the worse.
And so like, you can't ignore it.
But like, there's just so much happening and so much change
that's also sort of like hard to wrap your head around it.
I think for a lot of people, AI right now is sort of like a hammer
and like to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So like, people are just trying to apply AI to everything.
When in reality, I think like that the mindset should be,
what customer problems do I have?
And how might AI help me solve those customer challenges
to create a better experience?
Not all of those things require AI.
But there could be some like really, really, really interesting
use cases around that.
I sort of like bucket, I'd bucket like AI into,
around like specifically like customer experience things
into four buckets.
One would be more of like utility, right?
How does AI do things for me or my customer?
One is customer delight.
Like how does AI make my customers experience more enjoyable?
There's the thing I would kind of categorize as efficiency.
So how does AI make, you know, my life serving my customers
easier or my customers life easier?
And then the fourth is more on like insights.
Like how does AI spark new ways of thinking or new ways to do things?
From like consumer, like if I'm a DDC brand perspective,
of those four buckets, there's like,
there's clear ways in which my brand could be impacted
by those four things.
Like from a, from an efficiency perspective, right?
AI could make my employees lives easier.
I could do more things with less.
Those are more the obvious things and a lot.
Like there's a lot of like really great platforms
like customer doing like really impressive things around that,
right? That makes support agents lives easier
to help them answer customer questions faster,
you get to the right answers quicker
and do it in a really delightful way.
I think people sort of like ignore it.
But the thing that I care a lot about is like,
how do I make my customers life more enjoyable
and create like newer delightful experiences?
So much of the conversation around AI today
has been around Japots and LLMs and all that stuff.
And we can go into that.
I think there's some interesting things to be said around
like some of this like image or video manipulation
that's happening, which like, it's weird for me to say,
'cause I'm scared of some of it, like legitimately scared.
But there's some really like cool use cases
that you could also kind of like create.
So I think of like, oh, like,
we're just talking about this all the time,
but they've struggled to figure out how to do this at scale,
which is like,
do a personalized thank you message from the founder, right?
Like people have thought, I get right hand right,
written letters to that customer,
thanking them for the order for first time customer
and write something different
than if they bought from us a bunch.
But like, there's some cool things
that you might be able to do around that.
But I even take that one to further,
it would be great to have like a thank you video
that I see on my order confirmation
of my tracking experience that is literally the founder
saying, hey, Brian,
thanks so much for buying this melon hat.
Like here all the ways that I think you would get value out
of this and like leveraging AI to do that at scale,
I think it's like, oh man,
I think that's where you unlock some really unique
customer interactions that I don't think people
are thinking about.
- I like that.
I think what you bring up,
what you bring about in this conversation and topic
is that there is going to be this like new bar
for customers, this is just my hypothesis.
There's gonna be this new bar for customer support, right?
Because of AI models
and because now we can provide a certain standard experience.
When everyone's right here,
and then when, how do you differentiate, right?
Like how do you then you could celebrate your customers
but how and why and at what point?
And I love that, I haven't heard of that before
but that's a unique experience
and I do think that merchants have to think through that
a little bit more,
- Yeah.
- And provide now proactive, unique experiences
to differentiations of yourself and the brand.
How important is a,
well now how important is a brand?
And when I say that, meaning the story,
the elements, the emotions that a brand kind of pushes,
it maybe it's not more important than before.
Just what's your opinion on that?
- Oh man, that's like,
that's such, I like, I love that question so much
and yet there's so much impact there.
I think like, if you could almost think about
like remove brand from the equation
and think about relationships
and think about the people in your life,
like where do you find yourself spending time?
Who do you find yourself spending time with?
And that's how you should think about
what your brand is with your consumers.
It's like, how do I,
I'm trying to build a relationship with you,
I'm not trying to get you to like,
you know, know my tagline, like,
I mean that's important
but like, I think it goes way deeper than that.
It's where it's just like the little things
that you do to plant deposits
that can be harvested later in the form
of just repeat purchases from your brand.
It's, I think that's like the drive.
But I almost like, it's almost like,
like when you're dating somebody, right?
Like, you're courting them,
you're doing some things to build trust,
to drive affinity with them,
to get them to like you,
to give them to love you,
to get them to marry you.
I think people should think about brand in the same way.
It's like, I'm trying to do over time,
build this multi-dimensional relationship with this consumer.
And it's not one way,
it's not brand me kind of portray who I am to you.
It's like, I want you to know me and I wanna know you
and we should be in relation with each other.
And that will be beneficial to both of us.
- In your opinion,
- Yeah.
- This is a hard hidden question.
Do you think of brands can develop relationships
when they use AI,
or even AI responses via an email,
is that developing relationships between a brand
and a consumer,
or does there be that human element in it?
- Yeah.
I don't know.
- I feel like I'm on this.
- Oh, right.
- Yeah.
- I mean, like,
- There's no perfect answer here.
Let me just,
- You need to make it.
- People are trying to figure this out, so.
- Yeah.
- I like, what's that movie?
I forget that movie.
There's a couple.
- Yeah.
- Give me a better clue than that.
- I don't know.
(both laughing)
- You don't have to give up your eyes.
That movie, right?
- I'll try to think of it.
I can't think of it right now.
But like,
I think like chatbots are not there yet.
So I think more of the experiences degrade
the relationship than build them today.
'Cause like,
you can, if you as a consumer know,
you're talking to a chatbot
and the responses are very,
like even if they sound human-like,
but you know it's a chatbot,
it definitely feels impersonal.
So I don't,
I think the short-term answer is like,
AI should aid humans
in getting to like conversation or relationship,
like building elements faster.
Can AI reach a point where it replaces a human over time?
- Yeah.
- I feel like that's the goal, right?
Like people are trying to get there.
And if you do that in a way where the human doesn't know
that chatting look like a bot,
then it's possible, I would say.
- Yeah.
- But it's like if we're optimizing towards like,
hopefully they don't know that it's an AI bot.
We then, it's kind of confirmed that,
no, the best of the best is a human-to-human experience
because that's what we're trying to find.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's what, I mean, honestly, yes, right?
Nothing will replace that.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause that's what we're trying to do really.
- Right, right.
But I will say on the other side of the thing though,
on the other side of this,
there are conversations of like,
well, the best sort of customer support
is a fast answer right away.
And it's like, dum, like, yep, I wanna return something.
Here you go, just do that.
Or if you have, again, a question about a certain service
of the description, what does this mean?
Oh, here it is.
And that's it.
And I find that fascinating because it is kind of two sides.
It's like, well, you do want some friction.
Like if it's just like one flick
and you get your answer and that's it.
And that's your experience.
- Yep.
- I don't know.
- Yep.
There's gotta be more, like if you're playing the long game,
right, like I have this personal saying, right?
Play long term games of long term people.
If you're playing the long game with your customers,
you're optimizing for several dimensions
to build that relationship.
Like speed could be one aspect of that relationship, right?
But like we're multi-dimensional beings
and sometimes speed is what we want.
And sometimes slowness is what we want.
Sometimes like care and empathy is like more important.
Sometimes delight or like giving like levity
to a situation is like what we want.
And so yeah, I definitely like most of the conversation,
I sort of like, highlighted those four things.
And I think like what you are alluding to is right,
that efficiency in the equation.
But does efficiency remove delight?
- Nope.
- It could, it could potentially.
I think people need to like think about this
and just multiple dimensions
'cause I don't think it's gonna be reduced effectively
down to just like AI makes us work faster.
And then (laughs)
- Right.
Right.
Well, I'm gonna wrap this up, but I kind of feel like
I may have even more questions now
than before I start writing a lesson.
Sometimes people who have helped life.
But no, yeah, I really appreciate the time.
Always enjoy talking to you.
And I can't agree more, long-term relationships
with, wait, hold on, I got it wrong.
What was the saying you say?
- Play long-term, games with long-term people.
- Games with long-term people, I love that.
I hope we can get into doing that, yeah.
Thank you guys. - Yes, yeah, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
- We'll talk soon.
Thanks all.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)