Inside Redo | Customer personalization at scale through AI

0:00 Aaron, can you hear me? All right. >> Can you hear me? >> There we go. Good to have you. >> Nice. It's tough. Tough getting in. >> The uh the adjustment on the day I think is causing some errors, but we're all good. Okay. Well, I appreciate you joining. I feel like it's been a long time coming having you jump on one of these and kind of talk through holistically where we're headed. So to kind of intro, Aaron heads up revenue, has his hands in all products, was here from the beginning where everything was just returns and has seen basically every product now go through development stage and and kind of like paint the vision of what we're going towards. And so to kick things off, Aaron, maybe give us a brief background on yourself, kind of what brought you to Redo, and then we'll jump into a couple questions that I've got prepped for you. Cool. Yeah.

0:54 So, I've been at Ryu for two years now. Like Brandon said, run revenue and product here. Um, was at a company called Divvy, which was a fintech company here in Utah before that. You know, Divvy was was a successful company, had a lot of fun. And when we sold that business, knew that wanted to go be a part of another opportunity like this. And so, Redo kind of came came along. Um, I've always thought the ecom space is really interesting, uh, you know, as a as a shopper. And yeah, so we've been at it for 2 years and it's been a lot of fun.

1:25 >> Amazing. Amazing. We are now in the double digits in products that we're offering. And so as you've been here and you've seen the growth of all of them, I'm curious to hear from your perspective like a walkthrough of how the visions evolved from when you started and being a return software to where we are now. Yeah, it's a good question because a lot of it is actually like similar to what we always thought and a lot of it, you know, some of the details have changed along the way. We always knew that there was this opportunity for consolidation. You know, we when we kind of started evaluating Redo, just talking to, you know, e-commerce brands like here in Utah and and some that we knew, there were lots of, you know, we we saw that there were lots of apps to control it. it was a big, you know, painful thing to manage all the apps for these e-commerce brands because, you know, they run lean. We also saw that there was like data silos that were happening that you could provide a different experience for your customers. And that's that's always the thing that we've, you know, kind of held on to is like, okay, how do we one make it like cleaner and more efficient to like run the customer journey, but then two, how do we unlock some of those data silos that happen that allow for a better customer journey just overall to begin with. And so we always had that as the, you know, underlying vision of this. What's changed is like as AI starts to get bigger and you have see like there's this opportunity for personalization and and uh you know you can use AI to do a lot of the things that were in our vision that has changed some of the tools that we thought we might build you know two years ago we've kind of priorit prioritized them in different ways and uh that's come as a result of listening to customers and understanding the market and seeing where things are headed and and what are the challenges that people are facing and know where's where is their opportunity. But I do think the overall vision has always been there that like there's this platform opportunity where if you can consolidate some of these tools, you you can create a customer journey that is different, right, than than most people are offering today and it's it's a little more seamless.

3:34 >> For sure. I feel like there's a lot of movement towards consolidation. And I'm sure like a follow-up question that I was gonna have that you kind of touched on a little bit, but maybe we we take a dive into is as you've had conversations from 18 months ago to now, how those conversations changed as AI has come into the mix and has it pushed it a little bit more towards consolidation because of this AI wave that kind of is is sweeping across ecom right now?

3:58 >> Yeah, 100%. You know, like I said, you know, traditionally ecom's a space where like margins are thin. There's, you know, they run lean. And so AI is is doing, I think, a couple things that are interesting in the ecom space. One is you can be more efficient by using AI to run certain processes and and things that before like you had to have a lot of manpower behind, right? So like you think like an obvious one is customer support tickets and >> um [clears throat] what what kind of happened there and a lot of people are now using AI and agents to respond to tickets and you can get like 60% resolved you know without involving a person and that that saves a lot so you can kind of re-resource those people to grow the business. So, you know, it's changed from that standpoint, but also it's presenting both like challenges and opportunities and and how do you bring awareness to your brand and how do you deliver a customer experience? You know, last week Open AI releases the new Aentic shopping experience. And while it's a small sliver today, like you can see that world continuing to get bigger as e-commerce did, you know, I don't know, 20 years ago, right? You start to see like the beginnings of something that will get bigger and bigger.

5:14 And so just staying on top of of like where are the trends and and where the world is going and what's not going to change and having some you know predictions about what is going to change. It has changed some of the strategy. You know we started to focus on obviously like AI and customer support a couple years ago and then now there's some like GEO you know optimization all that is has kind of come along the way as a result.

5:40 >> Yeah. kind of kind of walk us through the product roadmap, I guess, and how that all fits in, right? Because it was returns and exchanges. We went to claims, package protection, looped in warranties, and kind of like then started to roll into a lot more spaces adding customer support. And so, kind of walk us through how that vision and like why we went the way that we did with introducing new products into the market. >> Yeah. So we really thought with AI two things there's a couple things that are really important to be able to knock out like okay how do I deliver a personalized experience and how do I really leverage AI to the maximum extent possible when you think about like for the longest time everybody's been trying to deliver a personalized experience their their customer and what does that mean I want to hit the right customer with the right message the right product at the right time right well if you think Okay, that sounds cool, but you know there's there's some challenges with that. One, you have data silos where one tool knows this data about a customer, another tool knows, you know, another thing about that customer and there's no like incentive to bring those together.

6:48 And then two, the manpower to go like set up personalization was just obviously very difficult. And then the third is if you could do those two things, what are like the delivery mechanisms? what are the tools that that actually enable you know that to happen and so when we started thinking about it it's like okay what are the what are the channels that um you know these these brands own where they start to get data points on a customer that are interesting um and so that happens in like returns that happens in order tracking obviously support tickets email SMS you know there's some stuff shopping on the site and then kind of separately from that is like okay how do we get information on the products and that happens in you know order management uh inventory management systems and so what's what's fascinating is those first tools they come together to create like the customer record right and what's what's interesting about this is I can now get a holistic view on a customer to see hey they're engaging with this product and order tracking emails and so when they go to make a return maybe I can recommend that product and my product recommendation you know, is is better for that customer. Um, obviously, you know, I I know their return rate, so I might message to them differently or or honestly like not message them at all, right? And so there's some obvious things that having that data and then using AI to enable like grabbing that that data at the right time is super powerful. And then when you put that together with the product record and you start to understand like hey this is a product that has a higher return rate.

8:26 So maybe I don't want to market it as strongly as this other one that has a low return rate and you can again use AI to drive like okay what's the right product? What's the right message? You know right time to a customer. That's uh that's how we've thought about it and gone about it and that's how we've ended up prioritizing like okay these are the things we need to to ship along the way. >> Yeah I love it. I mean, it feels like years ago probably teams sitting in front of whiteboards mapping this out on like the ideal state, right? Where we don't want to send emails to people that are high return customers cuz we end up losing money on them or we'd love to be able to match if someone bought this pair of pants and we know it goes well with this shirt and they abandoned cart with this shirt, can we just pair it with the pant? Like stuff that marketing teams would want to do but just didn't really have the ability to go and do it.

9:17 And if they did, they're trying to stitch things cross product and cross platforms to try and make something happen. And so it's exciting now like one, you don't have to have a person dedicated to tying all the things together, right? But it just all is flowing into a single space and then intelligently going and recommending the different pieces. And so I think that's a very exciting a very exciting piece. >> Yep. 100%. And I think that's what it boils down to. You know, you talked about the time like you just can't hire enough people. you don't have enough time in the day to understand how you should do it. And so that's that's what's cool about this new world is there's now technology that if you can get the data in the right way and kind of build the strategy around how this should work, then it can start to deliver what you've what you know all these e-commerce brands want to deliver, which is a really cool personalized experience. You know, I'm meeting Brandon where he is at the right time.

10:12 So, >> yep, that's great. Can you give us a couple examples of some merchants that are on Redo that are kind of seeing some of that synergy cross product and being able to see some wins based off of having things consolidated across products? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, there's a a couple that come to mind. We have a merchant who uh you know, we have AIS SMS for like a cart abandonment flow for instance, right? And there's a boutique actually here in Utah who uses that flow and it that flow takes into account shopper history obviously it takes into account what they have looked at and put on their you know wish lists or you know they've looked at in an order tracking email and what they've returned and AI delivers actually a onetoone message. So every message is different right for their customers when when you have a card abandonment happen. And what's interesting is like if if you look at like how it was previously done, everybody's getting the same message or at least like some version of it and it's it's very like basic. It's like, hey, you left this in your cart.

11:15 Sometimes there's a discount, whatever, right? Um we AB tested um that flow so the AI versus like their traditional hey you left something in your cart flow and it it converted 80% higher um on those cart abandonments than the uh than the existing flow cuz like you're just talking you know it's it's subtle things right but it's like hey you had the sample hey you know this would look good with what you bought previously and and like the customer feels like they're they're like really being messaged and it's it's personalized to them, right?

11:51 So, that's one example. The other with our returns product, you know, understand like I said the product data, we understand why they're returning the item and this customer history and we've had brands that have switched over, you know, from from the other players in the space and their exchange rate will increase by like 20% plus. I think the average across our merchants is 17%.2 to if you're getting super specific because we're going to when they say, "Hey, I didn't like this thing because it, you know, wasn't my style." Well, we know like, "Okay, this is this is their other products and these are the ones that are different." And we know like what the customer has bought in the past that they haven't returned. And so, we're we're recommending like a good, you know, saleserson in a store would do, like, "Hey, okay, you didn't like this one. It was too big. Great. here's a smaller size or this one wasn't your style at all. What about these things?

12:47 These are a little bit different and kind of more your taste, right? So, those are a couple cool examples that that we've seen. >> Yeah, I think it it's awesome this idea of being able to have almost a personalized shopper with you at every touch point, right? Then you go back and you revisit the site and you get a little popup in the corner that's like, "Hey, Aaron, welcome back. You know, how you enjoying the shorts? Like the shorts that you bought? Here's another shirt that just went on sale that pairs well with it. Do you want us to just throw that in the car for you? And you can create some like very cool experiences where it feels like you walk back into a store that you go to frequently. They know you by name.

13:22 >> They know what your size is. They know what you what you like, what you don't like. And so it's it's a very cool experience. Awesome. So as as you look towards the future, we've kind of like teased about it a little bit, this personalization at scale, the ability to consolidate in one platform, but as you look at like we have this conversation a year from now. What gets you most excited to then talk about what we built or you have on the horizon?

13:45 >> Yeah, I mean there's a lot there, but honestly it's it's it's really like fine-tuning this uh experience. we're in the early innings with with what AI can do and you know these tools you have to spend a lot of time like working to you know make sure that it has the right amount of power to influence like what's happening and not like go crazy with it. But what I'm most excited for is, you know, I think that just like helping brands. Um, what what's so cool when you talk to like brand owners is there's so much pride in, you know, I have this brand, I have this product, I created it, and like I just want the story and and everything to kind of match like my vision. And I think that this this new world, the technology that we're creating along with AI will allow brand owners to have like full autonomy and and control [clears throat] over like okay, I want to I want to deliver the personalized experience. I want to create the strategy. I want to you know train train it up. So it it's like an extension of that founder, right? The brand owner. So that's that's high level. I think some of the products that are interesting I think you know in the the marketing side being able to deliver personalized messaging and you know product recommendations and all that.

15:03 We're in the very beginning stages of that, but it'll just get better and better and and conversion will get better and you know some of the the challenges of e-commerce like it's been harder and hard harder to acquire customers, you know, over time like you just see the the cost customer acquisition go up, the rorowaz going down, right? All those things. And I think that there's an opportunity for some brands to really separate themselves in in the new world by delivering like personalized experiences. I think it's exciting to think about like what brands are going to be able to accomplish in the future.

15:35 And this idea of as a brand owner, you never really get into it stoked to go close 150 tickets in a day, you know, like that's not why you got into it. You got into it because you want to build an amazing brand. You want to make great products. You want to be able to like inspire people and do different things. And if you can do that at scale without getting dragged into kind of the tiny minute details that go into every piece of it and AI can handle a lot of that.

16:03 That allows you to be more creative and to be more focused on just brand building and creating a very custom experience that you want to deliver. >> And so I'm excited to see how creative people can get if they can offload some of the operational pieces to an AI. >> Yeah. And I think I think what's interesting about what you just said is like no no no you know marketer no owner no ops person uh sits there and dreams about responding to 150 tickets but they do want still want like their brand and their personality to come out in those tickets. And so sometimes they feel the need to right because that's what it takes to to go do it. And uh this allows you to scale that personality, that brand out to the public in a way that you're getting like the best of both worlds, which is fun.

16:50 >> Yeah. Very exciting stuff. Okay. Well, Aaron, I appreciate the time. Anything final thoughts? Anything on the horizon that you want to touch on before we wrap up today or any questions that we have from anybody that's uh that's joined us this morning? Yeah, I mean my last last thing would just be like I think my you know redo we're like committed to to being on you know the cutting edge of like where the future is going with tooling and AI and as as a brand owner that's something that I would be you know just very keen on like these these updates are coming from open AI from there's the tools it's like how is that how are the tools you're using leveraging AI to deliver, you know, the experiences to deliver efficiency for your brand to help you forecast and finance better. And I think that there's some really cool stuff coming out in that world. And so, just be on the lookout for for those things, whether from redo or just in general.

17:45 >> Yep. >> Okay. Good stuff. Thanks again, Aaron. Appreciate it. We'll run it back in in a couple months and see where we're at. >> Sounds good. Thanks, Brandon. >> Okay. Thank you.