Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / Why Journey Maps Miss the Returns Experience
Transcript
- Lucas: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, there's a small way to keep them coming — but first, let me set the scene with a number that stopped me. Luna: I'm ready. What's the number? Lucas: Loop Returns — the reverse logistics platform — looked at their merchant data and found that retailers lose about 21 percent of repeat customers after a single bad return experience. That's one in five people who would have bought from you again, gone. Luna: Twenty-one percent is brutal. And I bet most journey maps don't even plot returns more than a single arrow pointing backwards. Lucas: Exactly. Quick honest thing — a handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making episodes like this possible. No ads, no sponsors, just people who find the show useful. Luna: Yeah, and we're grateful. It keeps the conversations honest. Lucas: Alright, back to returns. So the reason journey maps miss this is structural: most maps are drawn by marketing teams and they treat the purchase as the happy ending. Returns feel like failure. Luna: Right, they're seen as a cost center, not a touchpoint. But the customer doesn't see it that way — for them, the return is part of the product experience. Lucas: Exactly. And some brands have figured this out. Warby Parker, for example, built their whole try-on-at-home model around the return being frictionless. They even include a prepaid return label in the box — not hidden on a website. Luna: And that's smart because it removes anxiety. The customer thinks, 'If I don't like them, it costs me nothing and takes two seconds.' That lowers the barrier to the initial purchase. Lucas: Right. So the return isn't an afterthought — it's a marketing lever. But most journey maps I see still have a big gap between 'delivery' and 'repurchase.' The return is just a dotted line labeled 'reverse logistics.' Luna: So what would a better journey map actually show for returns? Walk me through it. Lucas: I'd break it into four phases. First, the initiation — how easy is it to start a return? Is it a click in an account portal or do they have to call someone? Second, the handoff — when they drop the package at the post office or a drop-off point, what happens next? Luna: And third, the wait time between drop-off and refund. That's the emotional valley where a lot of loyalty erodes. Lucas: Exactly. And fourth, the post-refund moment — do you send a confirmation? An email that says 'here's a 10 percent off code for your next order'? Or do you just let them vanish? Most brands do the latter. Luna: Allbirds is a good example here. They give you a returns portal that's dead simple — you enter your order number, select the items, and they email you a label. The refund hits in about five days. But I noticed they don't follow up with any offer after the refund. That's a missed touchpoint. Lucas: It is. And the data suggests that a small incentive after a return can win back a meaningful chunk of those 21 percent. Loop's data shows that brands that send a follow-up offer within 48 hours of a refund see 15 percent higher repurchase rates from returners. Luna: So the return becomes part of the retention loop. But I want to push back on one thing — the idea that frictionless returns are always better. Some research shows that a slightly more difficult return can actually increase loyalty because the customer feels they've 'earned' the refund by putting in a little effort. Lucas: That's the 'effort paradox' in behavioral economics. There's a 2019 paper in the Journal of Marketing that found moderate friction — like requiring a customer to answer one question about why they're returning — can increase satisfaction because it signals the brand cares. Luna: So the key is intentional friction, not accidental friction. If the return process is hard because the system is broken, that's bad. But if it's hard because you're asking for feedback and that feedback gets used, that's good. Lucas: Right. And journey maps need to show that nuance. Instead of a single 'return' step, you'd have a decision tree: if reason = 'wrong size,' route to exchange; if reason = 'defective,' route to full refund plus apology; if reason = 'just didn't like it,' route to discount offer. Luna: That's a richer map. And it would force cross-functional alignment — you'd need logistics, customer service, and marketing all on the same page. Most journey maps I've seen are owned by one team, usually marketing, and they don't have the operational detail. Lucas: Exactly. The best journey maps I've seen for returns came out of a company called Happy Returns, which was acquired by UPS. They literally mapped the emotional state of the customer at each step — anxiety, relief, frustration — and designed the physical process around that. Luna: What did they find? Lucas: They found that the biggest emotional drop-off happens not during the return itself, but during the waiting period after the package is scanned. The customer has done their part, now they're in limbo. So Happy Returns designed a system where the refund is issued the moment the carrier scans the package — not when it arrives at warehouse. Luna: That's smart. It shifts the anxiety point to earlier in the process, but it also removes the worst part, which is the unknown wait. Lucas: Right. And that's a journey map insight you wouldn't get if you only looked at the purchase funnel. So if you're a marketer listening and you haven't mapped your return experience with the same detail as your checkout flow, that's the takeaway. Luna: And one more thing — don't forget to check buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo if you want to support the show. We'll be back next episode with another overlooked touchpoint. Lucas: See you then.