Improving operations through customer-centricity with Wine.com’s Addie Wallace

all of a sudden you could shop for wine anywhere and it could be delivered anywhere. So certainly to your home, and we had an advertisement that highlighted this, but you can be at a ski slope on vacation and shopping for wine and looking to have that delivered tomorrow. - Hello and welcome back to Conversations Resendesque where we explore new technology and trends in customer experience. Each week we speak with industry innovators and experts to hear their thoughts, unpack industry trends and discuss the most important ideas around CX. I'm your host, Nicole Sanders. Today's conversation is with Addy Wallace, a senior director at wine.com. She oversees the company's two subscription businesses, Stewardship of Free Shipping Program, and picked by wine.com, which is a personalized wine club, customer insights, brand strategy, and product marketing. In her time at wine.com, Addy has helped the company launch several new offerings, including that picked wine club, spirits, and virtual tastings. She also recently led a comprehensive brand refresh. The through line of Addy's work is an understanding of who the customer is, what they need, and putting that at the forefront of key decisions. Prior to joining wine.com, Addy spent nearly a decade in finance, first in investment banking, and then in private equity fundraising. She has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor's degree from the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University. She also holds a level three award from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust. Addy has a lot of great knowledge and experience to share. We have a fantastic conversation for you today. I've really enjoyed speaking with Addy about how wine.com honed in on their target market, and the unique personas within their customer base, then developed programs specific to the needs of each. Their approach is a fantastic example of how to keep your customers at the front and center of your business, and there's something here for everyone to learn. So enjoy this fun and insightful conversation. Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the Zenus complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at zendesk.com. Addy Wallace, welcome to Conversations with Zendesk. How are you today? - I'm great. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so excited for this conversation. I'd love to have you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit more about what your role entails and what you're responsible for at wine.com. - Yeah, absolutely. So I joined wine.com about five years ago, and I really own the customer perspective. So I own our brand and brand strategy, our customer insights, and more recently product marketing as well. - Wow, that's a wide range of responsibilities. - Yeah, it definitely keeps life at work pretty interesting and fun. - I bet. So it sounds like the common thread through all of that is really having a perspective on your customers and what their experience looks like. - Exactly. So I spend all of my day thinking about who our customer is, what do they need, and what can we do to best fulfill those needs? So helping us think about product features or how should we be talking to them and help them get the most out of what we offer because we offer so much. - So tell us a little bit about that. You have a lot of different offerings, why so many, and how does that play into the different personas of customers that you serve? - So we are the world's largest wine store, and we exist to help wine concierers live along their wine journey, no matter where they are. So you could be really just beginning or you could be somebody who's been enjoying wine for decades, and you know exactly what you like. So the beauty of that is the world really is your oyster, but it also means that we need to have services and offerings that help match different people in that journey, so to speak. So for newer folks, we have things like picked by Wine.com, which is a personalized wine club, and that is for people who don't really have the confidence to shop on their own. They know that they like wine. They might know that they like red wine or white wine, but they may not have the vocabulary yet or the knowledge to know, oh, I really like dry, earthy red that are light-bodied, and so therefore might not even be able to be the key to that to somebody to tell them, oh, I would like more of these. So picked really is great for that sort of consumer. You get matched with your own personal sommelier, and that song works with an algorithm on our side to comb through our 15 plus thousand wines. Oh, it's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wine. Yeah, I just like six bottles uniquely for you that match your teeth and your price point, all the frequency you're choosing. So that club is really, really great for helping people sort of like take that next step if they've decided that they want to continue exploring wine. For folks who are a little bit more casual, we have things like live chat. So now when I say chat, most people are probably rolling their eyes, like well, every website today has a chat function. I'm tired of chatting with bot. Well, guess what? We don't actually have bots. We have real live white experts who are sommelier's and people with advanced degrees and wine. Wow. Are sitting there waiting to just answer your questions and help you navigate to the right product, or right category, or right region, or even just talk about parings or oftentimes, they just sort of nerd out with you about whatever wine topic you might have. Right. So that's a great feature for somebody who's sort of in that middle who's just sort of like, I've got to them quick on my mind. For sure. And then on the farther end of the spectrum, for somebody who's really into wine, I'm this great service called stewardship. And that's sort of like a no-brainer for the frequent wine consumer. So stewardship is our prime for wine.com, if you will. So it's our free shipping membership, but it also comes with a whole lot more. So you get free shipping on orders that are over $49. You get access to exclusive products, such as Bordeaux futures that are really hard to come by. And then you get exclusive deals, just for being a member, as well as access to in-person experiences at wineries and at tasting events around the country. So we really do have a little bit for everybody, no matter where you are in that wine journey. It sounds like wine. You've got a lot of really great offerings. Like you said, a little bit of something for everybody. But you also have really clear personas, right? You really understand the divisions of the different kinds of customers that you're dealing with. Let me know if I'm wrong, but I imagine you've also mapped out what kind of help people maybe move through that, right? Maybe you show up and you start chatting with the bot and you get into it and then you join picked. And then you get really into it and you move into becoming a stewardship customer or something like that. Tell me a little bit if you can as an organization, how you went about, it's some way you start out with just like here's your customers and you got to figure out what are those breakdowns and what should that journey look like. What are some of the exercises you've gone through or tools that you've used to help define those things over the years? - I think this is something that's constant work and progress as you will. So I don't think that any company can do this once and just say like great, we're done. Chances are your business and the customer is going to evolve over time. Yeah, but pretty recently about 18 months ago or so, we went through and did a really deep dive brand strategy project actually. And that was super helpful for reconnecting us like super deeply with that customer. And so that exercise involved doing qualitative and quantitative research, honor customer looking at the data set, what are they doing? And then talking to consumers out there who didn't necessarily shop with us but who were shopping in the category, how are you guys interacting with this product? Who are your go-to resources both for shopping but also for inspiration for lifestyle? So just like really understanding the wine consumer from a 360 degree view of everything that they think about when it comes to wine. So I think having that really fundamental understanding of who your customer is is definitely sort of like the key to everything. Yeah. And then we stepped back and said, okay, well, now that we know who the customer is and what they need in that exercise, we assess where there are gaps in the offering from other folks and where we felt like we were best suited. We looked at that and said, okay, so now yes, what are those white spaces that we are truly uniquely that up to attack and own? So for wine.com, we have over 15,000 wines. That's about five times larger than the typical specialty store. So a lot of folks listening probably have a total wine and more nearby them. They carry three-ish thousand products. And when you walk into one of those stores you're like, there's so much stuff here. Well, you walk into whatever warehouse that's like a football field of wine. It's pretty incredible. But for folks who maybe don't have a specialty store, it's about 30 times larger than your average grocery store selection. So again, a lot of product. And that's sort of like what makes us really different. And that's great. But how do you operationalize that to make that the most useful for the customer? Now, I'm going to say, For most people, they don't want to walk around a football field looking for wine. That's too much product to choose from. Edison, where you're like, which label looks good? Do that. Exactly. So, so much of what we are doing is really like the special sauce for us is adding that guide and layer on top. So it's like, if selection is the base of everything, what we need to figure out and what we are actively trying to do every day is just make those guidance tools super useful and super helpful. It's a word tailoring those or the specific personas. Like I talked about like picked, for example, is really targeted at that person at the beginning of that curve of that wine journey. So they've decided, I've leaned in, I'm willing to spend $20 on a bottle of wine. But yeah, I just don't feel super confident walking up and down the aisle. Right. Or maybe that person knows like a couple of wines they like and they want to branch out, but they don't begin to know how to do that, right? Right. Yeah. I think like the number one thing you hear from my customer is I just want to pick the bottle with the prettiest label because like what I don't understand, what this wine is called. I don't know where it's from. If there's all in a different foreign language, but like this looks interesting. And I think it's made out of peanut water. So I think I'm going to like it. You know, like there's just not that much information that they're not making super informed shopping decisions for really helping them hand hold. But yeah, sorry, back to your original question. I think really understanding that customer is in that. So like I said, brand strategy project, other tools that we do on an ongoing basis that I think is really helpful is constantly surveying and interviewing your customers. We have a real good pulse on who the customer is, what they're thinking, constantly collecting feedback. What do you think about this thing that we're doing? How are you thinking about wine discovery? How are you thinking about? I say, where are you looking for for information or inspiration? Asking these questions of our customers on an ongoing basis, I think really helps us find to all of our new initiatives. Seems like that would be really important because as you mentioned, you can do that deep dive research, sort of in a poor way in time. But of course, interests and desires are changing. I'm sure in wine, you're finding that there are different trends depending on anything from how the weather is in a given season, in a growing area to which celebrities promoting what kind of wine, all of these different things that are probably factors. Are there any other key indicators or key ways that you collect feedback or get insights about how customer tastes are maybe evolving on a more day-to-day basis? We have a few things that we do that are sort of like the ear to the ground. One is a simple thing like an NPS survey that sends out every day to recent shoppers. Let's make sure that we're collecting that data. Oftentimes, that is the canary and the coal mine for some issue that maybe wouldn't have been in the front and center. We'll put things on our site like little exit intent surveys. Again, trying to catch people organically as they're interacting with us. We certainly feel a lot of user testing research and we use a platform called user testing for that where like, hey, here's a prototype. Let's interact with it and talk about what you're seeing there. The other piece is also taking brand awareness measurements on a periodic basis. So again, trying to understand, okay, well, there's two pieces to this right where you want to talk to your customers and understand what your customers are saying. But you also want to talk to wine consumers or like your target audience at large and make sure that you're not out of sync with the people who haven't yet discovered you. Trying to build out your AI strategy for customer experience, then be sure to tune into the conversations with Zendesk podcast featuring interviews with Zendesk and Fortune 500 leaders about using AI for CX. Subscribe on Apple Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. One of the really great things that you called out is that you have that chat widget that pops up on your site. I went and checked it out this morning and I was like, oh, there's a chat. I just asked about that. And it is good to know that it's staffed by real humans as opposed to a bot, right? There are certainly use cases where using a bot or other AI makes a ton of sense, right? So I can be collecting some additional intake information, but I can see that with the way that you're engaging with your customers, your organization really priorities has like, hey, this does actually need to be a very human experience. That being said, you're managing tons of customers, tens of thousands of bottles of wine. There's got to be some technology obviously involved with tracking all of that information. Are there any major tools or processes that have made a really big difference in your business, be able to manage all of that? How do you balance the efficiency of that skill with that very white love touch that you have your customers? It is a careful balance. I think part of it is making sure that our agents really understand the products. So we're really hiring experts and some folks are more expert in some category than others. So somebody might be really great with French and Italian wine and let's say somebody comes online looking at chat about Australian wine. Well, it's actually really easy for them to pass the customer off to somebody who might be a little bit more suited to talking about that. So that's always an opportunity. I think on the data side though, something that we're thinking about and trying to figure out is just how to pass more of the customer preference information to that agent. So there are prospects who come and chat. Of course, we don't know anything about those folks, but back in, come through in a conversation, no problem. We also have a lot of existing customers who want to chat because they're on that wine journey and they're like, okay, I just discovered this really great little region in Rome and now I want to look for something similar, but not sure where to start. It'd be great for that agent to have that data in front of them like, hey, this person just bought these wines. So to save the customer the time, the agent could just come in and say, hey, I saw you enjoy these wines last month. Are you looking for something similar? Are we talking about a different occasion? I think that would be such a great enhancement to the experience. Do you think about, I don't know if you enjoy a wine at all, but a lot of folks have a local store that they like going to where they have a relationship with the owner or some sales person and they're in this ongoing dialogue with them of like, hey, I really love that bottle champagne that you suggested last time. Like, oh, yeah, how is that dinner party you were hosting? You know, there's this back and forth in recognition of you as a customer and you as a person. And I think that that's sort of like the next step that we need to make in our personalization journey through chat. Yeah, that would make a lot of sense because certainly as a customer, again, if you're coming on a regular basis to shop, you don't want to start over each time. Oh, here's my experience last time and here's where I'm coming from. So is that something that you are looking to implement? Is something that you've started working with where you all add in that journey? Well, I think that we're doing it well right now is with picked because there's this like natural sequence and dialogue that's built into the subscription business where you have to provide feedback back to your son in terms of the chat piece that is, I think, the next frontier that we looking to tackle. So let's pivot a little bit and I would love to talk about the company's values and the ethos. Clearly, putting in your customer's front and center is really important to you. How do you reflect that from a brand perspective and throughout your company culture and how does the organization really think about and talk about their customers from the brand perspective? We just really try to celebrate who that customer is and put ourselves in the customer's shoes. So coming out of the brand strategy work, we did a little bit of a brand refresh where we updated some of our aesthetics and wine guy got a little slendown in modernize. We have a little mascot in our logo. We affectionately call wine guy. That's what we're referring to. I like it. So we'll wine day went on a little diet. Wine day went on a little diet. It became a little bit more gender neutral, but wine person. Exactly. Wine person, thank you. But we in that brand refresh, we really try to send home in on the customer and that moment of enjoying wine. Now that might seem table stakes when they say that, but actually prior to this brand refresh, we had really been focused on ourselves from a brand perspective. It was all about us. We do this. We do that. We provide this. We provide that in this brand refreshes helped us turn the lens around a little bit and say, no, this is actually about you customer and about your enjoyment. So rather than us talking about our features, we want to talk about what are you getting from this? You're getting discovery. You get access to these products. You get personalization. And again, it seems like it kind of a subtle thing, but I think it's actually a pretty big change in perspective. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm personally really excited about that. And I think that we're finding that our customers are too. It also helps really differentiate us. What is the response to that? that change Ben. - I think that people are really excited. It feels fresh. It's a more modern take actually on doing business. I think there are a lot of companies certainly that do this well. But in our space at least, why can we be such a serious topic? Because of that sort of aura, I think our whole industry has really like put the product up on this pedestal like, oh, let's all talk about this product. We just sort of pause or reflect and we're like, actually we should try not the customer. They're the ones who are enjoying it. Cheers to that. It's felt like a bit of a change in our industry, which is really exciting. - How have things evolved over the years? What were some of the first projects that you were involved with that helped to differentiate the brand or improve the customer experience? - Why did the commas definitely been growing and evolving a lot over many years? We were founded nearly 23 years ago, I think. - Wow. - The big things that have really evolved the experience, the first one probably was the development of our app. So just what do we think about when they're common what we offer? We are all about selection, guidance and convenience. And the app was a huge unlock for this convenience piece. All of a sudden, you could shop for wine anywhere and it could be delivered anywhere. So certainly to your home and we had an advertisement that highlighted this, but you can be at a ski slope on vacation and shopping for wine and looking to have that delivered tomorrow, sort of unlocking that experience for the first time I think was quite big for us. Chat was definitely another one. This idea of having a real life wine expert ready to hold your hand as you needed it. Again, wherever you are, you don't even need to be the way to sort of figure that out. And I think more recently we've been adding new features to try to help bring that to the next level. So right now we're really focused on helping customers on that journey, but it really focused on discovery because wine is such an immense category, really helping people figure out, where should they be tasting them? They knew, do they want to expand their palette and so forth? So we're really excited about a new feature that we've just launched, which is mapped. And that allows customers to navigate the wine store visually for the first time. Wine is such a geographically specific product. I mean, we talked about terroir and so forth, but even if you don't want to get into terroir, the reality is that peninuar produced in California tastes really different than peninuar produced in Burgundy. And for all sorts of reasons, terroir, wine making style, et cetera. So it doesn't really make sense for you to be looking at a huge list of just peninuar from around the world to a product from Russian River next to one from Burgundy. That would be very different products, right? Yeah, it apples in orange. So now adding this map view where you can say, okay, actually, I know that I really love Russian River Pino. I want to go look only at products from there and helping them dive into it from that perspective, I think will be really, really helpful for a lot of customers. And obviously, we have had like filtering capabilities help people do that. But I think just that visual component is super, super powerful. Well, it sounds like you're really leveraging a lot of different kinds of technology to help people in a variety of ways, right? We know that people approach obtaining information in different routes, depending on your preferences and your learning styles and things. And so you've got some visual things, you've got the chat, you've got some guided help. Do you offer anything that helps your customers connect to each other and build relationships with other wine fans? So something that started in response to the pandemic was we started doing virtual tasted. It's funny because in February of 2020, we were about to launch an in-person experience. This is it. I missed it. I really, ooh. There's so many stories like that. You know, terrible timing. Exactly. Really, while we think we need to pivot, and we did pretty quickly, starting in April of 2020, we launched a series of virtual wine tastings with both the hostfromwine.com as well as the wine maker or principal from the vineyard for the winery. And that was such an incredible initiative and really helped connect consumers around these products that they loved. So it was really fun to see people interacting and chatting with one another. Since then, we have, in fact, opened up some more in-person experiences. And so that's another way where that happens. So people can get together and find each other at a James Suckling tasting event in New York City, or there's a whole bunch of these tasting events like Great Wines of Spain and others. So that's been really fun, but I do think there is more of an opportunity to connect people. I would love to see us gamify the experience and have people inspire each other on these journeys 'cause so many of our customers are wine experts as well. Why not? If you're really into burgundies, I'm sure there's a lot of other people who would love to know, like what do you think about these wines or what are you tasting? What are you pairing these wines with? - It seems like a wonderful opportunity for community. You would think that wine enthusiasts would wanna connect with each other and whether it's just a hop online and discuss what they've discovered or learned or to plant hastings or gather rings or any sorts of things like that. So that's very cool. Hopefully we'll see that in the coming years. - Yeah, it's definitely on the short list of things to start tackling. So we're very excited about that. - Well, if somebody was going to come to the wine.com site and try it for the first time, any pointers or tips or what's one thing you would love somebody that's new to this experience to know. - I would definitely recommend folks chat with one of our wine experts. I think there's no better way of quickly getting to something cool, interesting in your price point. You set the parameters, they will help you find it. I would also call out if you are a wine lover and you have a great experience, you should absolutely join our stewardship program. Like I said earlier, it is a no-brainer for frequent customers. You get free shipping on every order of $49. That pays for itself in one and a half orders. So get going and I hope you enjoy it. - Great. We'll have to check it out the next time posting it in our party. - Absolutely. - What's been so great to talk to you today, wine.com is a great example of how a business can really put their customers first and have that customer's interest in around everything. So good luck with everything, Addy. And thank you so much for joining us today. - Thank you, Nicole. I appreciate the conversation. - That was such a fun conversation. Addy offered so many great examples of how to create a truly customer-centric business. So go check out their website and their wine clubs. You might just find one that suits you. They've done a fantastic job pulling it all together. Then join me for our next episode when I'll be speaking with Hafefantas from Squarespace. We'll talk about why great design is such an important part of business and how Squarespace has optimized the way that they collect, respond to, and act on feedback from their customers. It's such an important topic. I know so many businesses struggle with this. He'll tell us how they've pulled together everything from bug reporting to product feedback to their voice of the customer program. You'll definitely have some great ideas to take away from this episode. So be sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss it. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with a friend or colleague or you could write us a review and Apple podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and being a part of our community. You can always join the conversation at zendesk.com/community or connect with other zendesk users through our user group meetups. Find the one for you at usergroups.zendesk.com. Until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders, I'm just a guest at Zendesk, the intelligent heart of customer experience. Ready to explore how AI can help your business provide richer customer experiences? Zendesk enables you to instantly harness the power of AI to deliver scalable world-class customer experiences. In the era of intelligence, the X, Zendesk is here to help you find your way. Sign up for our free trial at zendesk.com. [MUSIC PLAYING]