Company Overview

Launching in December of 2015, Groove Life has quickly become an industry leader for adventure seekers needing high-quality products that match their lifestyle. Driven by its mission to serve people, inspire adventure, and reflect God, Groove Life constantly adapts its customer service to make each person’s experience more seamless and convenient – especially when it comes to ecommerce returns.

To understand how ReturnLogic helped Groove Life optimize their returns process to match customer expectations, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Rachel Alexander, Project Manager for Customer Experience Professional, and Spenser Woodard, CX Director from Groove Life.

How has life changed for your team since implementing ReturnLogic?    

Initially, Groove Life responded to customer inquiries via email or phone. With the company’s rapid growth, this wasn’t practical, so they added a Returns Management Platform. 

Rachel: “When we implemented ReturnLogic, it was amazing to go from having to email or call each customer individually to getting their products out the door right away without a customer needing to speak with us. As a team, we were handling maybe 1,000 returns per day, and as soon as we implemented ReturnLogic, that immediately added 500-600 extra people that we were able to help just right off the bat. So that was crazy. Just the amount of people we could help just having this product”.    

Groove Life realized that empowering shoppers to request a return through a self-serve returns portal not only saved their team hours per day but also allowed their customers to avoid waiting on calls or emails.    

Spenser: “The best customer experience is really what the customer wants. Allow them to have the path and the journey that they want to create and maintain. ReturnLogic has been a huge piece in that. It’s like our self-checkout lane – it’s the route a customer can go where they don’t feel like they have to speak to anyone if they don’t have to. It’s very seamless. ”   

What has changed over the past few years to prompt your team to look for something new?    

Shoppers want convenience, timeliness, and options so they can choose their own returns journey. As retailers, putting a process in place to meet those expectations can be challenging without flexibility in a returns management platform.     

Rachel: “What’s convenient for us might not be convenient for the customer, so it’s useful to pivot and focus on what each person needs. People are getting used to tailored experiences and instant experiences, but they want total authenticity, as well.”    

How do you balance automation and manual control to give customers that tailored, instant, and authentic experience?    

Spenser: “We focus on the different return paths the customers are taking and to what end. Then we try to figure out how to turn that up or turn it down depending on what we’re seeing”.    

With different returns experiences or paths, automating some steps while keeping control over others gives Groove Life the ability to adapt to customer needs.   

Rachel: “We’ve also been open to the idea of adapting. Okay, we’ve got these systems and processes; if those are working, great, but if there are still issues, what in our return policies do we need to change? So, we’ve been open about changing what our policies are and what the warranty is going to be.”    

How do returns data play into the experience?    

Spenser: “The data can show us if a certain product is getting exchanged, returned, or warrantied a lot. You can start to see spikes. That’s useful for the customer experience and our product development team, and our wholesale team. When we’re talking about our main goal this year, it’s to be the best customer experience team in the world. And to do that, ReturnLogic and the data have played a very massive part.”   

Being able to learn from every return goes beyond just the customer experience. Returns data allows retailers to see when items have a high return rate, if a product is faulty if there’s a bottleneck in the reverse supply chain or other opportunities.   

What’s the biggest obstacle getting in the way of becoming the best customer experience team in the world?   

Spenser: “Right now, a customer can have four different experiences. They can call us, they can email us, they can text us, or they also can go through ReturnLogic. So just making sure that everything aligns with what we’re trying to offer, ensuring that every customer, no matter what platform they’re deciding to go through, is given the same treatment. To me, that’s the ultimate success for us.”   

Future Plans…

Moving forward, Groove Life will continue its quest to be the best customer experience team in the world. The team hopes to add more automation into their “94-Year No BS Warranty”. Similarly, the outdoor adventure company plans to build onto ReturnLogic’s public open API to get their returns data flowing into their other business data tools.