Customers Are the Real Boss: Dave Hobbs Unpacks One Day Only’s Adage
One Day Only is one of South Africa’s most revered eCommerce brands. Founded in 2009, the company is the country’s original flash sale website, offering Black Friday like type deals, every single day.
Representing the company at ECOM Africa is Dave Hobbs, Customer Operations Specialist, who we recently caught up with. Being with the company for over four years, he unpacked how important customer service is for the success of the company and how the company will be aligning themselves to their evolving customers in 2023.
Make Sure You Win Over Your Customers!
Dave states that his focus is on his customers, and this will be conveyed in his topic; “Creating Experiential Moments To Win Over Customers”.
“Customers are the real boss”, he says. “Forget managers, supervisory, team leaders and directors! Customers pay our salaries and dictate whether or not our business is a failure or success.”
“Winning them over is crucial and we’ve never been in a more competitive space. Not only that but it takes more than a good deal to win them over, all that does is get you one deal!”
He goes on to unpack that for the modern customer, it’s all about the experience. Once you start getting that right and you’ll win them over and have a long-term investor helping you achieve your long-term goals.
One Day Only Are Constantly Evolving Their Customer Journey
One of the steps that One Day Only has taken to de-define the customer experience is to open communication with the client. They have done this by offering WhatsApp as a primary means of communication.
“We are striving for a 15 minute reply time on emails and a 1 minute reply time on instant messaging.”
With this, they are not only aiming to achieve heightened customer experience, but a seamless process from signup to check-out to return.
Success Lies in Overcoming Industry Challenges
Dave states that one of the biggest challenges to the company is finding the balance between making staff, customers and stakeholders happy while remaining profitable and attractive to outside talent.
However, in order to overcome this, they have taken various steps to heighten the customer experience. One of these has been the decentralisation of leadership in Customer Service.
“We have been actively moving from a team of 40 reporting to one manager into teams of 3-8 reporting to team leaders who report to a manager to improve direct customer service.”
This has proven to be highly successful and has carved out room for growth and given customers the ability to speak to someone more relatable and human.
From there, success lies in the company being completely accessible to the customer.
“Customers want everything to be instant and accessible, from communication to delivery, and this is what we are aiming to achieve with the decentralised strategy”.
Hear More at ECOM 2023
Dave will have this, and more to share at ECOM Africa 2023.
“I’ll be moderating and part of a discussion on Creating Experiential Moments To Win Over Customers and am excited to see you there” he says.
In order to hear more about One Day Only’s strategy from Dave, register here and book your seat today.
