Latest / Talk Commerce / True Classic Combines AI Innovation with the Human Touch in Customer Experience at eTail Palm Springs
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:00.142) accident day. Welcome to the special e-tail edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jordan Gesky She is with True Classic. Jordan, go ahead and an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Yes, so I am the customer experience manager at True Classic, actually the senior customer experience manager. senior part is new. And I oversee all Day customer service operations as well as the customer journey from start to finish. So making sure that it's smooth and it runs smoothly and customers aren't hitting pickups at different points of their pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase. So that's kind of everything that I oversee at True Classic. And then one passion that I have is family. I am very passionate about my family. I have three small children and outside of work they run my life. That sounds very familiar to me. My kids are all grown. So anyways, won't get into that yet, but we did talk a little bit about how brands are changing some of their verticals based on some of the demographics and opportunities in there. Maybe we could kind of dive into that. Speaker 1 (01:19.822) But one thing I do want to ask, so you have post purchase journey. Do you look at how that post purchase journey would, how you could leverage some of that to get more sales from your existing audience? And I think one idea, one thing I've seen is in the shipping emails and in the post shipping, giving some opportunities to buy again. Yes, so we use Parcel Labs actually for our post purchase and we have a landing page when a customer is trying to find their tracking or wanting to start a return, they get sent over to a landing page that lives on our website where we're able to really customize different blocks. So at TrueCostics. We have a membership program and we really want everybody to become an insider of True Classic because those customers are some of our strongest customers. They're repeat customers and they have a strong voice in how we run our day to day. So we advertise things like the membership if they're not already a member, our newest product launches. So if you bought a shirt last Thursday and you're tracking it and we launched a shirt on Monday, we're now able to show you that shirt and you're more likely to come in and be like, I really like that and I'm gonna purchase it again even though you just made So making sure that we're not showing you like what you already made or what you already bought and keeping that newness alive. So being able to customize those post purchase blocks on our return stage and our tracking page. One of the things that you mentioned in the green room was just this idea of being AI forward or least employing AI to help the journey or help your own internal systems and journey. What type of things can you tell us about that you're using? Speaker 2 (03:01.806) Yeah, so I really enjoy AI. Two years ago, AI was fresh and new and we were all a little bit scared of it, I think. And even myself, like, I was, oh no, I don't want to use AI. And now, learning how AI can actually be a benefit to your team and not necessarily take their job, but allow them the freedom to take on higher level tasks versus having to take on like the nonsense. repetitive questions like how do I return something, AI can do that for you. They can even help walk your customers through those step-by-step things versus having to take an agent's time to do that. So I think that the world of AI is going to continue to grow and we're going to see even more great things out of it. I like to see it as an addition to, not a replacement for. Mm-hmm. One of the things that we heard earlier was that you still want to have that human touch in that, especially in the digital experience. Are you seeing more of a human touch or are we still too early in the AI journey for people to start rebelling against Skynet? That is a great question. I think the human touch is very important. I think that everybody still wants that human touch. if you get a customer who's upset, the last thing that they want is to deal with AI who's potentially going to give them a wrong answer or send them into a loop. So the human touch, don't think is ever going to go away. But what is interesting is we can now train AI to have things like tone of voice or even Speaker 2 (04:43.982) air quotes personality because it's not a person but it can pick up on some of those like personality traits or sayings to make it feel more human like so that it doesn't necessarily scare away customers like we may have previously seen so it's going to be a fine balance but I think it's going to be good I really do think that it's only going to make everybody more productive and make customer service such a wide space and I will quickly say like there's different levels to AI so a lot of times you think of like AI agent but there's also AI that can help your agent so like you can type in to an AI platform, like I got this question, how do I respond to this? And it'll help you by reading your company's processes and things like that. And I think that's really important when we look at how companies use DPO agencies and there's sometimes cultural differences. A customer uses a word and they're not sure what it means. AI can help support them in writing that response. So it's still that human touch, we can still edit it to be human, but AI is able to support us in that as well. also helps if you're a creative block or if you're flustered because somebody's yelling at you in the chat and you're like, I just need somebody to... I use all the time to get a jumping off point for how do I write this LinkedIn post? I can't think of anything creative. Have you seen different styles of AI reflect differently for your clients? Do you feel as though the bots and how they're acting on the website are, I mean are you experimenting with that type of thing? Speaker 2 (06:25.676) Yes, we are just starting to get into the experimental phase. even using bots to help, or using our chatbot. We name our chatbot crew as a play on like crew neck t-shirts. So we try to give it that personality. But we have it not only helping with like our very basic questions like return and Wismo, but really training it to be a product connoisseur and helping customers to figure out their sizing, to figure out the best product like. Hey, I'm going on a date, like what is the product recommendation for me? Things like that. taking it to a next level so that it can do more and help more when a customer is interested in it. Tell us a little bit about True Classic, your retail footprint, your digital footprint, and what's your ideal client. Yes, so currently we are a men's apparel brand hoping to expand in the future to potentially children and women, but we're focused on dressing the man from head to toe. And so we just want everybody to feel good, look good, and just feel comfortable in their own skin. So our ideal customer... literally ranges from out of college through grandparents. Granted, we have different categories of our outfitting that could fit differently. We have professional wear, we have basic wear, we have just everyday t-shirts, but our goal is really just to make the whole male population feel good, look good, and then expand that into women's and children along the lines. And we do have retail stores in some major cities. Speaker 2 (08:13.495) We have some in Chicago, Arizona, Florida, and we're looking to expand our brick and mortar. And you try to drive traffic between the two digital and retail We do, our retail spaces are currently so much smaller that while we try to really find those local segments and market them to go into our stores, we're not there like broader yet to advertise that across our whole platform. What do you find that customers are looking for now? And is it different than the last couple of years? Are customers growing with AI? I mean, I hate to keep saying AI, but are they growing with it and are customers changing in the experience they expect on your website? Yeah, I would say that customers are growing with AI. I think as it becomes more well known that a majority of companies you interact with are using AI whether you know it or not. Customers are becoming more accepting of it. So I do a lot with reading our reviews and our CSAT and things of that nature. Speaker 2 (09:25.31) our AI will get very positive CSAT scores. Like, this was great, it was fast, I didn't have to talk to anyone, things like that. So it's becoming more more accepted. Of course, you still have the people who are like, absolutely not like no AI. And in those cases, we just get them over to you human as quickly as we can. But I wholeheartedly believe that AI will continue to grow and be accepted. So earlier I've had a couple of conversations today about AI sales or AI shopping bots and that you would eventually you're going to be able to deploy your own shopping bot that's going to go scrape a bunch of places and come back to you with what ideally you want and then the merchant is going to have to have a way of interacting with the shopping bot. That'll be completely different than interacting with a human. Do you see anything like that in the future? Not just for True Classic, but for anybody? Do you think that we're seeing that now or do you think that's soon to come? Are you just driving like an AI personal shopper? Whoa. I have not. So like AI, personal shopper, then I come to these AI, it's like entry AI. I could see it in a day and age where we as humans are just looking for like the easiest and. Speaker 2 (10:44.226) quickest way, especially because AI is cheaper than a human. Like you could pay a cheaper subscription for an AI personal shopper versus an actual human personal shopper. I do think that it is going to add a level of complexity to AI. I haven't explored it, but I could see it happening. What are you excited about this year for True Classic? I am excited to see how we can continue growing. we, I've been with True Classic for four and a half years. I started as one of the first 10 employees at True Classic. We're up over 50 employees now. So it's just exciting to see a company grow and continue to expand. And while I can't guarantee what the expansions will be in 2025, I'm excited to offer new customer groups a way to look good and feel good. Speaker 1 (11:37.601) The customer experience that you're seeing, are they, do you, I'll start over again. Are you, I know that you want to move into different categories. Are you seeing them ask for those different categories and how are you measuring that? Yes, we definitely see men come in and ask for their wives, like our female line. during the holiday season when we're pushing all of our advertisements for men, even women who are shopping for their loved ones will request a women's line. So it's really exciting to see that be out there and be questioned. have, I mentioned it earlier, but like our membership or insiders group. they are constantly asking for their wives. Because again, those are our loyal customers. So when they are wearing it every day, they want to be able to share it out with the females in their life. So I'm super excited for what that means. Additional channels, do you channelize your business for TikTok shops or anything like that? Yes, so we are working to expand TikTok Shop in 2025. We were all scared TikTok Shop was going away, so we were unsure how to align with that, but we're excited to continue growing that. We are in Target expanding our showcase there. We're in Sam's Club, Walmart online. So just about everywhere you can find True Classic, so that's exciting. Speaker 1 (13:04.078) So, we have a few minutes left here. As I close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. Is there anything you'd like to plug today? I would like to plug... Run Disney. I am a big fan of both Disneyland and I like to run and I recently did my first run Disney race and I want to continue doing them and I want to find a way to get myself into one of the challenges out there. Run Disney. The challenges where you run the 5k half marathon and marathon? So shameless plug there and then for my husband to let me fly to Florida and do that. There you go. So my cousin just did it this weekend with his wife and his daughter, the princess. Half marathon. So there you go. Speaker 2 (13:52.526) So I ran the half marathon in Disneyland in October and it was the hottest October that Anaheim, California has seen in years. was 105 degrees by the time I finished the race. was wild, but I still loved it and I want to keep going back. Awesome. Good. Well, we could keep going about running, but we're going to stop now. Jordan Gesky, no relation to Wayne Gretzky. Well, it's a different name. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Close enough. Speaker 2 (14:25.752) Thank you.