The Problem
Like every e-commerce store, abandoned carts were a constantheadache and costly challenge for Thinx. When customers made a last-minutedecision not to go through with a purchase, it added up to missed revenue,diminished profits—and the painful knowledge that they weren’t realizing theirfull commercial potential.
As a high-performing and fast-scaling business, it was an area they weredetermined to tackle. Already, they were sending customers who abandoned cartsautomated emails through Shopify. But they wanted to find a cutting edge andhad the idea to make real people—rather than bots—responsible for convertinglost customers.
"We’d developed a workflow where our CX team received an emailed list ofall the abandoned carts each morning, along with customers’ names and emailsand a link back to their cart," said Brendan Hastings, VP of DigitalProduct and Engineering at Thinx. "The team would literally go throughcustomers one by one and email them. Our thinking was that if there was a humanelement and customers could get immediate answers, we’d see an increase inconversions versus automated emails."
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. The process became a hugeworkload for the CX team, without bringing a sufficient increase in conversionsto be worth all the time, cost, and effort.
Despite that early stumble, Brendan was convinced humans beat bots when it cameto recovering lost purchases. And he quickly had another brainwave.
While exploring SMS as a way of engaging with customers during the store’sannual sales period, it struck Brendan that human-powered text messaging couldalso hold the key to improving his cart recovery rates.
"Using SMS for cart recovery, alongside the emails we were alreadysending, felt like a good fit," said Brendan. "But we needed aplatform where real people were on the other end of those messages. So if acustomer texted back, rather than some sort of bot trying to parse what thecustomer had said, a real-life, friendly agent would be there to answer theirquestion to the best of their ability and help them to buy."
If Brendan could find a suitable, human-driven platform, he could save valuabletime and resources internally, increase the store's revenue and profits, anddrive even more positive sentiment about his brand.
The Solution
Brendan discovered cart recovery service LiveRecover anddecided to try it out. The platform was free to use until they’d recoveredtheir first $500 of revenue.
What really won Brendan over was the fact that LiveRecover is powered by realpeople, who engage personally with his customers to convert abandoned cartsinto sales.
"Having live agents—not bots—recover our abandoned carts is superpowerful," said Brendan. "They contact our customers manually tounderstand why they didn’t purchase, are able to answer their questions inreal-time and help them make a decision to buy."
Brendan Hastings, VP of Digital Product and Engineering
LiveRecover’s Features:
- Automatic Sync: Abandoned carts and customers’ contact details automatically sync to LiveRecover, requiring no admin time from Thinx.
- Tailored Outreach: Personalized texts are sent to customers 30 minutes after every cart is abandoned to understand why they didn’t buy.
- Trained Agents: Knowledgeable agents are available to answer common questions like shipping, fit, measurement, and product-specific queries.
- Incentive Offers: Agents offer small discounts, such as free shipping, to seal the deal.
LiveRecover also provides advanced features to maximize conversions, including:
- Conversion Reports: Actionable insights to improve store and service performance.
- Transparency: Full visibility of customer conversations.
- Data Analysis: Extraction of key phrases to reveal hidden customer concerns.