Native Shoes Saves Over 1,700 Hours a Year by Automating Returns

Background 

Native Shoes designs footwear to take families from shore to backdoor, and keep sustainability in mind. But prior to 2021, their return management process was anything but sustainable. In an industry known for high return volumes, Native Shoes had to manually process over 50,000 returns a year—resulting in a less than ideal customer experience.

  

They realized that to meet their business goals of providing exceptional customer service, they needed to automate their returns process. Native Shoes initiated their search for an OMS and found a partnership with Deck Commerce.

 

Challenge 

Prior to implementing Deck Commerce, managing returns was a manual, time-consuming, and multi-step process. After a customer mailed their return to the warehouse, there were multiple touchpoints required across warehouse associates and customer service.

  

Rather than simply scanning the return in the warehouse and triggering an automatic series of actions, the warehouse associate sent all returns to customer service. Once notified, the customer service team began their multi-step process by utilizing spreadsheets, manually calculating the refund owed back to the customer, processing the refund in the payment gateway, and notifying the customer of the processed return.

  

While errors were inevitable with these manual steps, the time spent processing each return created an additional challenge for the customer service team as they had slower response times and missed their contacts-per-customer goals.

 

Solution

With Deck Commerce, Native Shoes’ returns management process has become fully automated. Now, the warehouse simply scans the return and Deck Commerce communicates the refund to the payment gateway as well as triggers an email notifying the customer of their processed return. These new automated workflows slashed the return processing time from several minutes to a few seconds.

 

Now, Native Shoes can invest the time they were spending on manual processes into providing exceptional customer service. While maintaining the same number of staff, they have increased service levels with contacts-per-customer, respond times, and first call resolution – achieving goals that were a challenge prior to implementing Deck Commerce.